As Though They Knew the Way
by augiesannie
Summary: Eight years have passed since they last crossed paths. When they meet again, in post-war Salzburg, the Captain and Maria are no longer the same two people they had been, back when they danced in the garden. But as Rodgers and Hart wrote, "Sometimes you think you've lived before, all that you live today/Things you do, come back to you/As though they knew the way."
1. Ghosts

**GHOSTS**

Moving at a brisk pace, Georg strode from the station. He had already buttoned his overcoat tight in anticipation of the raw March air, and having expected to find a lifeless city huddled under gray clouds, he was surprised to find himself squinting against the sun's sudden glare. Salzburg appeared bright and busy under an impossibly blue sky. For a moment, it was as though the war had never happened.

Waving away a porter – he had just the one bag, since his stay would be brief – he slumped into a taxi.

"Hotel Bristol," he told the driver, and then stared with amazement at the city that slid by the windows.

He saw now that the war had, indeed, left its mark; piles of rubble everywhere, empty brown patches where he remembered verdant parks and gardens, and more beggars and miscreants dotting the sidewalks than there had been even during the difficult 'thirties. But on every block, crews were filling in gaps with sturdy new construction, young saplings had survived their first winter, and the sidewalks teemed with people wearing that distinctive look of self-important Salzburgers.

The streets, too, were packed, and the taxi's progress was slow. Georg forced himself to relax. Despite having overcome far more terrifying and tragic challenges, he had truly dreaded this trip, his first to Salzburg since escaping Austria with his family eight years before. Leaning forward, his eyes warily surveyed his surroundings, searching for them: the ghosts.

No matter where he went, the ghosts might appear. Sometimes, he could make sense of the apparitions: during the previous month's stay in Vienna, he'd been certain he'd spotted Elsa a dozen times or more, but that was understandable, in their old haunts. Whether she was reigning over the Opera from a distant box, threading her way through a crowded gallery, or glimpsed through a shop window, her gleaming golden hair and ivory glow had seemed so real, even though by now, he knew she couldn't be real at all.

On his recent trip to Paris, his first since the war had ended, it had been Agathe, not Agathe as she would be today, but the way she'd been on their honeymoon a quarter-century earlier, all tumbling mahogany curls and delicious curves. He thought he'd seen her everywhere, stopping to peer in the shop windows along the Champs Elysees, sketching what seemed like every statue in the Louvre, picnicking in the Bois.

But the ghosts were sometimes people who were still very much alive, turning up in places they didn't belong. Once, while at St. Moritz, his imagination had conjured up Max, of all people, schussing capably down the slopes, something the man would never dream of doing, in a place he could not possibly have been.

It was also in Switzerland – this time in Zurich, he recalled – that he'd seen the ghost of the little governess, Fraulein Maria, towing two children by the hand across a traffic-choked street, while a third clung to her black, side-walk sweeping skirts. That vision had been especially unsettling, to see the rosary swinging at her waist, the voluminous habit topped off with a high, elegant wimple that didn't manage to capture the coppery fringe that swept her forehead.

As a general rule, Georg tried not to think too much about Fraulein Maria, or the completely inexplicable and unsuitable attraction that had sparked between them during that summer. But that was eight years ago; they hadn't heard a thing about the girl since she had run away from the villa, the night of Elsa's party. She'd probably long since taken her vows, and was tucked safely behind the cloistered walls of Nonnberg Abbey.

If, in fact, Nonnberg Abbey still existed. Was it still there? And what ghosts might Georg expect to see roaming about Salzburg? That and other questions flew from his mind as the taxi pulled up in front of the Bristol at last.

An hour later, having placed several telephone calls and sent out a half-dozen notes, Georg found himself prowling restlessly about the hotel's finest suite, which took up its entire top floor. Now there was nothing to do but wait for replies. At least the suite had a bar, although one stocked only with champagne, which did not match his mood. And what on earth was he going to do with a phonograph?

"I don't really need anything so extensive," he'd told the clerk. "It's only a couple of nights, and I'm here on my own."

"There _is_ nothing less expensive," the clerk had sniffed, without looking up.

"I said _extensive_," Georg growled, "I've got plenty of money. But surely another guest could make better use of a salon, two bedrooms and two baths." He noted with satisfaction the way the man's face changed when he caught sight of the name scrawled in the register.

"Oh! Captain von Trapp! I didn't realize – forgive me!" the clerk's face had brightened and his tone turned to an oily simper. "It's an honor to have you with us, sir. But, you see, the suite is actually the only accommodation available. Salzburg is quite crowded, between the tight supply of housing, the people returning, and the Americans still here." He lowered his voice to a confidential murmur. "The only reason the suite is even available, is that none of _them_ can afford it!"

And so now Georg wandered about the high ceilinged, lavishly furnished space, surveying Salzburg sprawled in every direction beyond the suite's windows. It was just as Max had written to him: while nearly half of the city's buildings had been destroyed, and times were hard for its residents, many of the landmarks had survived, including the Dom and Mirabell Palace. The Hohensalzburg Fortress still looked out over the city, and yes, there was Nonnberg Abbey, with its distinctive red dome, clinging to the cliffs nearby. His eyes followed the ribbon of the Salzach River as it wound through the city, underneath the sole bridge that had survived the war.

His thoughts were interrupted when a chime sounded, announcing the lift's arrival. Anticipating either a reply to his missives or the bottle of whiskey he'd ordered, he watched the doors slide open, revealing a beaming Max Detweiler.

"Surprise, surprise," the little man chirped, stopping for a brief embrace before elbowing his way past Georg and eyeing his luxurious surroundings appreciatively. "I like the way you live, Georg. As though the whole ugly war was just a bad dream." His casual, lighthearted manner belied the fact that, although they had recently exchanged letters, they hadn't seen each other in eight long and harrowing years. It was impossible to miss the lines in Max's face, the silver hair and stooped shoulders, the frame a good twenty pounds lighter than it ought to be. Georg, weighted down by guilt, let the teasing remark go with a smile.

"It's good to see you," Georg told him instead. "The bar's pretty thin, but if you wait a minute, they ought to be sending – ah, there we are," he said, grateful for the interruption when chime once again announced the lift's arrival. He took the whisky and ice from the waiter, and poured two stiff drinks.

"To peace," he tilted his glass toward Max, who echoed, "To peace," adding, with a wink, "and to prosperity," before tossing down the drink and sighing with enjoyment.

"Prosperity?"

"Yes, my dear Georg, prosperity. It's lurking around every corner here in Salzburg, and now that you're here, I intend to help you take advantage of the opportunities. It's the least I can do for you, after you managed to spirit me out of Salzburg and on to Shanghai, and just in the nick of time. It was quite heroic of you, what with having to get your own crew out of here, and dealing with Elsa."

"Shanghai was no picnic, or so I heard," Georg commented, anxious to change the subject.

"No, but it was much worse than the hell they'd have sent me to otherwise." Max was eager to change the subject too. "Georg, my friend, I've got a million angles for you. The construction-" Max began, but Georg cut him off.

"Save your angles, my friend. I'm here for just a few days, and then I'm off to New York. I haven't decided whether to base myself there, or London, or possibly both, but one thing is certain: for me, there is no more Austria."

"No more Austria? But this is your home!"

"If you want to call it that," Georg snorted. "That's why I'm here. The villa. They used it as headquarters, you know. I'd burn it to the ground if I could, but my solicitor won't let me. I'm here just long enough to arrange for it to be emptied, cleaned up and sold."

"Sold? But Georg, that place – you and Agathe – how can you?"

"Agathe is gone, Max. It's been a dozen years now. She's been gone nearly as long as we were married."

"You do realize there's a fortune to be made here, don't you?"

"I've got a fortune already, Max. Tucked safely away, more money than I can spend in a lifetime, or my children in theirs."

"All right, Georg. If you won't stay in Salzburg for love or money, consider your obligation to your country. The place could use a man of your leadership qualities. All my joking about the business possibilities aside, Salzburg is fighting a different kind of war now. Those who fled have now returned, demanding the return of their property from those who stayed, each side taking the high ground and accusing the other of having been spineless cowards. Sorting out the assets, dealing with the collaborators – it's serious business. The Mayor's in over his head, and the Americans are no help at all. They won't leave and let us run our own city, but at the same time, they are too caught up drinking our wine and eating our strudel, to sort things out. And meanwhile, there's nowhere near enough housing, or fuel, or food. Or rather, there's enough, but between the Americans and the speculators, the prices have been driven so high that ordinary folk are suffering the most. It's exactly the kind of mess that a man with your experience could sort out in a minute."

"I see," Georg said, "and tell me, Max, where exactly do you fit into this? Your angle, as you put it."

"Me? Well, I'm still keeping my eye on the music business, but I also seem to have developed a good instinct for knowing before anyone else when there's a decent room to let, or when the stray shipment of sausages or load of firewood has fallen off the back of a truck, that kind of thing – and I simply try redirect it to those who might need it the most. Not the big hotels, not the Americans, but people like me, people who are getting their feet under them again. They get what they need for their families, the big shots never notice what's gone missing, and I -"

"Let me guess. You get something for your trouble."

"Exactly! My grateful customers are always willing to slip me a few extra shillings. It's not the kind of living I made before, but it's a start, while my real plan falls into place. You see, I've made it a particular point to get to know the Americans who are overseeing all this construction, and when it's ready to be let out, and the Americans clear out and leave it in my hands, I'll be in on the ground floor, so to speak. Look! I've even got cards printed up!"

Georg took the card and glanced at it before tucking it into his pocket.

"Come on, Georg. Just come on out and reacquaint yourself with the Mayor. Meet a few of the Americans. Give them a bit of your sage advice. It couldn't hurt you."

"It wouldn't do you any harm, either," Georg said dryly. "No, Max, I'm sorry. I wish you all the best, but no."

"Well, you can't blame me for trying." Max sighed. "Look. I've got to get going. Plenty to do before I leave town in the morning for a spot of business in Vienna. You wouldn't care to get something to eat, would you? There's a lively little café, just off the lobby."

"No. I've got to arrange to get a work crew started out in Aigen. I want them out there first thing tomorrow. But I'll take the lift down with you," Georg said, "and buy a paper at the newsstand."

Out in front of the hotel, the two men shook hands. "I'll be back in a few days," Max said, "and if there is anything I can do for you, or anything I can talk you into doing for Austria, just say the word. You've got my card." With a jaunty salute, the little man disappeared into a taxi.

The sidewalk was still crowded, and as Georg elbowed his way to the newsstand and back again, his thoughts had already returned to the task at hand: hiring a crew to work on the villa. He only wished there were a way that he could avoid going out to Aigen at all, but certain tasks, unfortunately, could not be easily delegated. He'd made a promise to his children, and he intended to keep it.

Before returning to that mausoleum of a suite, he turned back for a moment, letting his lungs fill one more time with the crisp March air, marveling again at how life in Salzburg had resumed, taking in the busy scene. On one corner, a newsboy shouted out the headlines. On another corner, two sharply-attired men greeted each other with handshakes and half-embraces. Directly across the street, a young woman, dressed in a stylish suit the color of autumn leaves, leaned down to tie her daughter's hair ribbon.

One more moment, and he would have turned away and returned to the hotel.

One more moment, and things might have turned out quite differently.

But in the space of that single moment, the young woman in the gold suit straightened up and looked in his direction.

Those eyes.

Deep blue, a clear, bright, burning blue, fringed with dark lashes. He knew those eyes, and that wide, generous mouth. But it couldn't be! As far as he knew, the little governess had disappeared behind the walls of Nonnberg Abbey. Not to mention that the real Fraulein Maria wouldn't be wearing a stylish suit; she'd be wearing a habit, the way his imagination had conjured her up on the streets of Zurich. Surely, this was just another one of his ghosts, and the red-headed little girl clinging to her hand a stand-in for one of his daughters. Fortunately, he knew just how to vanquish this apparition, although he was oddly reluctant to do so. He looked down at his shoes, sturdy, expensive boots of black leather, knowing that when he looked up, she'd be gone.

Except she wasn't gone. Even Fraulein Maria's ghost was too stubborn to do as she was told! She was still there, staring at him, frozen with something like fear, which only made Georg more certain that she must be a ghost, because the real Fraulein Maria had never been afraid of him. But even though it had been eight years, and despite the elegant costume, and the way the golden cap of hair had grown out into a knot that lay low in her neck, and how her slim build had spouted some curves, there was no question. It was her.

Georg let the passers-by jostle around him, ignoring their impatient glances and murmurs of annoyance. Just then, a streetcar lumbered through the street, blocking his view of what lay on the other side. Four impossibly long cars, one after the other, screeched and rattled their way across his field of vision. When they had passed, the two figures, woman and child, had vanished.

He still wasn't entirely sure if she'd been real, but in the time it had taken the streetcar to clear, he'd been overtaken by a rush of emotion – sweet, wistful memories of that last, unexpectedly happy summer before the world had gone dark. But there was anger and bitterness, too: she hadn't even said goodbye! The girl had simply left a meaningless note and disappeared, run back to her Abbey, breaking his children's hearts and stoking their resentment against Elsa, though he couldn't blame Fraulein Maria for what had happened next on that account.

Whatever or whoever he'd glimpsed across the street, there was no denying the role the little governess had played in rebuilding his family. Although none of them could have known it at the time, she had laid the groundwork for his family's survival during the turbulent years that followed. If only he could ignore the memory of that dark-blue gaze!

It _couldn't_ have been her. And yet Georg knew he wouldn't be able to settle to his task in Salzburg until he'd banished this particular apparition.

He plunged into the traffic and across the street.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**

**Welcome to my new story. My last story got such a good reception that it made me nervous to try another one, and I've been tinkering with this for months (when you see the convoluted plot you will understand why). The good news is that large chunks of the story are already written, so if it gets a good reception, I'll be able to update pretty frequently.**

**I'm trying something a little different this time, starting with a rating that I hope will bring back some of my readers who don't like mature content. Let me know if you're a returning reader! Don't worry, still plenty of feels coming.**

**As you've already seen, the story takes place in postwar Salzburg and elsewhere, and I understand that it almost completely overlooks the deep suffering that took place after the war across Europe as well as the political circumstances; I've completely invented my own version of history and ask your forgiveness and history's as well. **

**I still don't own anything about TSOM, and I still do this for love.**


	2. Lottie

**LOTTIE**

"You can if you want to."

Those had been his last words to her, or very nearly so.

"You can if you want to."

Just six words, spoken with a shrug and an air of chilly indifference, but Maria had never forgotten them.

It had been a matter of no importance, just the question of whether she was to dine with his guests, followed by his absurd suggestion that the whole party would wait for her to change into evening clothes she didn't own. But it was those six words, with the intimacy of their dance in the garden still so raw and immediate, that had infuriated and hurt her. Now, eight years later, those feelings rushed right back to the surface, along with the humiliation and disillusionment of her subsequent encounter with then-Baroness Schrader. It was as though Maria hadn't long ago left behind her old self, that naïve, dreamy-eyed girl.

The old Maria had immediately fled to Nonnberg and spent a week in seclusion, on her knees in prayer, begging God to erase her feelings for the Captain from her wounded heart. But Reverend Mother had ordered her to return to the villa and find out the truth from her Captain, and she had been packing her carpetbag for her return, her heart full of foolish hope, when the von Trapp children made their second appearance at the Abbey's gate. They'd already been turned away once, Sister Margarethe had explained, while she'd been in seclusion. This time, she'd agreed to see them, anticipating a cozy reunion and their joy when she agreed to accompany them back to Aigen. How stupid she'd been, to be caught unprepared for the crushing disappointment when they revealed the news of their father's imminent marriage to the Baroness.

Not that any of it mattered any more. What _ought_ to matter, Maria told herself, was that, since then, she had proved herself worthy, fearlessly conquering danger, finding a love as fierce as any she could ever have imagined as a postulant at Nonnberg Abbey.

"What will you have, Madam?"

Startled, she looked up at the smiling waiter and then down at the menu card. At these prices, anything they ordered now might have to take the place of dinner. But in her rush to evade Captain von Trapp, the elegant tearoom had been her only choice; it took up most of the street, and they could hardly have sought refuge in the barber shop or the dentist's office that took up the rest.

"Just some hot water for me, please, and a hot chocolate for the little one," Maria told him.

The shock of glimpsing the Captain across the street slowly faded, and Maria's racing heartbeat slowed, her distress giving way to fond amusement as she watched Lottie take it all in. At first, the little girl just brushed her fingers timidly against the pink velvet banquette, but as she looked about, surveying the posh surroundings, her eyes filled with wonder until her sweet freckled face fairly glowed.

The tearoom must be new, since the war: Maria couldn't remember anything quite so gaudy from her years in Salzburg, not that she'd have dreamed of patronizing such a place at any time except her few months tending the von Trapp children. Where were they now, she wondered? Safe from harm, she hoped. No matter her feelings for their father, she prayed for them every night.

The vast space was stuffy, and overheated for March. Laughter and loud conversation echoed across the tiled walls and floor, underscored by the constant clink of cutlery and china and the silvery tinkle of the bell whenever the door opened. The lively crowd – mostly women, the occasional child and not a man in sight – seemed even larger and grander when reflected in the wide ribbon of mirror that wrapped around the room.

Maria's glance lingered on her reflection in the mirror, letting herself be reassured by the appearance of the woman in the stylish suit who looked back at her. Although she knew nothing of the von Trapp family's fate during the war, she _had_ known that she might encounter him. That was only one of several risks she'd taken by bringing Lottie back to Salzburg, but it was a risk she'd had to take, at least until she'd saved up enough money to satisfy Petersen's demands. Afterward – well, she wouldn't think of that. She wasn't even sure the Captain had recognized her, or if he had, if he'd noticed the gold ring that gleamed on her right hand. As far as Maria was concerned, the only thing left of the girl she'd been eight years before was the freckles.

Fortunately, her composure and confidence were fully restored just in time for the commotion: the tearoom's door flew open with a bang, its little bell pealed mightily, and her eyes followed the crowd's to see Captain von Trapp wading across the packed room, his furious blue eyes fixed on her.

He was wearing a dark business suit, rather than the Trachten jackets he had once favored, and appeared as handsome as ever, despite quite a few more silver threads in his hair, and as arrogant, too. The mob simply parted before him, giving Maria barely enough time to wipe her palms on her skirt and lift her chin at him in a way that she knew infuriated him.

"You left without saying goodbye, even to the children," he spat, fingers twitching by his side.

Maria didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In between "_You can if you want to,"_ and _"You left without saying goodbye, even to the children,"_ had fallen eight years of suffering, millions dead, her own life shattered and rebuilt.

"How do _you_ do, Captain?" she countered. "Won't you join us?" A waiter rushed over with a tiny gilt chair, and after the Captain had folded himself into it, she nodded across the table, saying, "Captain, this is Charlotte."

The harsh lines of his face went soft, reminding Maria of how he had always had a soft spot for little girls. Lottie was just about the age Marta had been, that long-ago summer.

"How do you do, Charlotte?" he said gravely. "Or do you prefer Lottie?"

"Oh, she won't answer you, Captain. She's deaf. She can't hear you, and she can't speak, either, at least not yet."

Feeling a little self-conscious, Maria turned to Lottie and explained the situation aloud while conveying the basics with signs.

"Lottie, this is Captain von Trapp. I cared for his children, a very, very long time ago."

"If she can't hear you, then why did _you_ speak to her, Fraulein?"

"I didn't say you were wrong to speak to her. She is going to learn to read lips, and it's not too soon for her to practice. That's what Clara told me to do, to speak to her always, although I'll admit I do feel foolish doing it sometimes, especially when we're alone."

"Clara?"

"Clara is a teacher, one who's been trained to work with deaf children. I met her during the war, and she has come back to Salzburg to work as a governess, and now that I've brought Lottie back here -"

"Back here? Back from where? Where have you been? And why aren't you-"

Lottie had gotten fidgety, clambering up on her knees and turning to favor the party at the next table with one of her captivating smiles.

"She makes friends everywhere she goes," Maria laughed. By the time she got the little girl turned around and properly seated, the waiter appeared, bearing Lottie's hot chocolate in an enormous pink cup. He clucked sympathetically as he delivered the bad news that it was not possible for the Captain to order a whiskey, and agreed to deliver a pot of coffee instead.

By the time Lottie was absorbed in her beverage, and the Captain had his coffee, Maria couldn't wait another moment to let the words burst from her mouth.

"Oh, Captain, what of your children? Are they well?"

Captain von Trapp took another sip of coffee and put down his cup.

"Well, Gretl and Marta are in boarding school, in Switzerland."

"Boarding school?" Maria said with dismay.

"Don't waste one of your disapproving looks on me, Fraulein. It might interest you to know that I took the whole family to Switzerland, just after you – ehrm – just after the Anschluss. It was difficult enough, maintaining an entire household with only a housekeeper to help. After choosing a suitable school for the oldest ones, I took a house nearby for the rest of us, one just big enough to hold everyone at the weekends. But now, of course, not only is the war over, thank God, but the nest is nearly emptied."

Despite her misgivings, Maria felt the years fall away, slipping easily into the dynamic that had developed between them during their brief relationship: teasing, challenging, but underneath it, a shared commitment to the children and a growing measure of respect, at least until that last, miserable night.

"You cared for the children on your own?"

"You may recall that I could not keep a governess here in Austria," he said with a tight-lipped smile, "and those were far more stable circumstances. It was easy, anyhow, at least compared to what it took us to get there. I had to take the children over the mountains and out of Austria by myself, in the middle of the night, on foot."

"But how did you manage that?" Maria knew those mountains well enough to imagine the ordeal. And what did he mean, by himself? What about the Baroness?

"Those are my mountains. I could never get lost up there. Although I couldn't have done it without the oldest three. After that, of course, we were virtually imprisoned in Switzerland for the entirety of the war. Had I taken even one step across the border, the Germans would have thrown me in prison, and no Allied country was going to take in a German-speaking hero who'd fought on the other side in the last war. Tell me, Fraulein, are you paying any attention at all to Charlotte?" he asked without pausing.

Lottie was dipping her fingers, one after the other, into the cloud of whipped cream that sat atop her hot chocolate and daintily licking them clean. The next few minutes were given over to gentle reproofs, signed and spoken, and a bit of clean-up, before Maria could ask, "And what about the others?"

"Brigitta is in London, at University. Kurt is in London, too, but as he did not prove to be much of a scholar," and here their eyes met in understanding, "so he is working for my father-in-law. Louisa is teaching in Spain. Friedrich is still in Switzerland, pursuing his medical studies, but hoping to settle in America. My children made quite a few American friends during the war."

"And Liesl?" Maria said eagerly.

"Liesl," and for the first time his face really lit up with a smile, "made an especially good friend of one of the Americans, a fine young man called Tom. She married him, and they've gone to live in New York. He's finishing his studies and planning to become a teacher." He stopped to take another sip of coffee before adding, casually, "She's expecting a baby."

"A baby!" Maria clapped her hands at the thrilling news. She'd been happy to hear about the children, but sad, too, thinking of how hard it had been to leave them, and all she'd missed in the intervening eight years. She had such tender memories of Liesl's first heartbreaking romance and now the girl had found her happy ending and was going to be a mother! "How wonderful! When?"

"June," he replied, and then he changed the subject so quickly she wondered if he was embarrassed to become a grandfather. "What about you, Fraulein? What happened to Nonnberg Abbey? It must not be Fraulein any more, am I correct?" he nodded in Lottie's direction.

Maria's thumb tweaked nervously at the heavy gold ring, but she'd had enough practice that the reply came quickly and easily.

"Please don't ask me about that."

The Captain nodded somberly. He would have known, as well as anyone, how the conversations went in this post-war era. So many losses, so many families torn asunder, if not by death, than by divided loyalties to sworn enemies. It was considered good form to respect such a response, and not dig for details that weren't freely volunteered.

At that point, it was natural enough for her to sneak a look at his right hand, and she blinked in surprise to find no ring there. During her summer in Aigen, he had, of course, been wearing his first wife's ring, but what of the Baroness, his second wife? Well, if he had asked about her status, surely she could do the same.

"You," she cleared her throat, "you haven't said anything about the Baroness von Trapp."

"Agathe?" his eyebrows lifted in surprise. "She's right where I left her, as far as I know. In the cemetery at Saint Rupert's. I'll be stopping there tomorrow, first thing, as soon as I can arrange for a driver."

Maria frowned. "I don't mean her, Sir. I mean, Captain. I mean-"

"You're speaking of Elsa," he said flatly, his face and voice utterly expressionless.

"Yes, the children told me – I mean, I understood that – did she not accompany you to Switzerland?"

"Please don't ask me about that," he said mockingly, and then more gently. "No. She did not accompany us to Switzerland, Fraulein. Ehrm – I mean Frau – "

"Why don't you just call me Maria," she suggested. By now, she was burning with curiosity about the Captain's second marriage, and that ringless hand, but those were the rules of post-war Europe, rules she'd been taking more advantage of than most, so she'd have to suppress her curiosity.

"Are you living back at home?" she asked, navigating to safer ground.

"Me? No, no. I'm staying just across the street, at the Hotel Bristol, but only for a few days, and then I'll be – well, living, I guess, in London some of the time, and New York the rest. Near the children. I'm only here long enough to arrange to have the villa cleaned out and put on the market."

"But Captain! How can you leave your home? What about your family?"

"That's just exactly what Max Detweiler said," he shrugged. "And I'll tell you the same thing I told him: I'm finished with Austria, or rather, Austria and I are parting ways, neither one of us being what we were when I served her. And even if I were inclined to spend time in Austria, it wouldn't be in that house. The Nazis used it for offices, did you know that? I've come back for a last check on anything worth keeping, and to hire some men to take care of the rest, and then I'll be gone for good."

In response to Maria's inquiries, he went on to explain that Herr Detweiler had spent the war years in Shanghai, and had returned to Salzburg a few months earlier. Frau Schmidt had survived, having gone to live in the countryside with her sister, and Franz, the Captain said, "disappeared into the German machine, and good riddance to him."

There was something different about this Captain, something at once more resigned, as though the fight had gone out of him, and yet more comfortable letting the sadness come to the surface. Maria was different too, of course, and she felt a surge of sympathy, wishing they could share their stories. Which, of course, was impossible, especially once a loud slurping noise revealed that Lottie had reached the bottom of her cup. The girl smiled charmingly at the Captain, her little white teeth gleaming from out of a face smeared with chocolate.

"Where are you staying?" the Captain asked.

"Us?" Maria took her miniscule lacy napkin and began to dab at Lottie's cheeks, but the cause was futile. "We've been at a rooming house, but it's a small room without cooking privileges, and the cost of eating elsewhere is - I've been looking for three days, and I'm beginning to think it's nearly impossible, so I really ought to – Charlotte, darling, what have you done to yourself?"

"Hold on!"

Captain von Trapp reached into his pocket and produced a card.

"Max Detweiler has got all kinds of connections to decent, affordable rooms, or so he says. Why don't you come over to the hotel and I'll telephone him for you? Meanwhile, you can get Lottie properly cleaned up."

"To your hotel? Oh, I don't know," Maria said doubtfully, but he had already tossed a pile of bills on the table and was halfway across the room. Lottie, clearly in his thrall, had slid down from the banquette and was trotting after him. Maria had forgotten the way that when you were out in public with the Captain, women, as well as their gazes, followed you everywhere. That hadn't changed, even though everything else had.

"But, Captain," she protested, even as he scooped Lottie up with one arm and pushed open the tearoom door with the other, "I'm not sure this is appropriate-"

"Maria," he chided her, even as he offered his free arm. "You are no longer a postulant at Nonnberg, are you? And I'm nearly a grandfather. Now. Shall we?"

There was nothing to do but to accompany him across the street and into the hotel's vast lobby, where a small café was already filling up, even though the waiters were still setting tables and a trio was still tuning its instruments. The Captain gently set Lottie back on her feet and accepted a sheaf of messages from the clerk. Then they were riding upward in the lift, Lottie leaning against Maria's leg and looking upward for reassurance at the odd sensation.

The lift opened out directly into the suite, which had two big bedrooms, one at either end, each with its own large, immaculate ensuite. Maria took Lottie into the vacant bedroom to tidy her up, returning to the main salon just in time to hear the Captain slam down the telephone and let out a curse.

"Captain!"

"The child can't hear me," he said defensively, although he had the good grace to look embarrassed.

"But _I _can."

"Well, and you are no longer a postulant, are you? When are you going to explain about that, anyway?"

"Never mind about that. What's wrong?"

"I'll tell you what's wrong," he said, picking up the sheaf of messages from the desk and waving them at her. "These notes? That call? It's turning out to be impossible for me to find anyone to do the work at the villa for at least two weeks! Salzburg is so – so – _prosperous_," he sputtered, "that no amount of money or connections can free up a few men for some honest work."

"I am sorry to hear that," Maria said sympathetically. "What kind of work?"

But he had already begun to make some more telephone calls. Reluctantly, she realized that the Captain's worries had probably caused him to forget his offer of assistance. Her heart fell at the thought of another day of fruitless searching, and the shrinking store of cash in her pocketbook.

He put down the telephone again. "We really ought to be going," she said politely, punctuating with a few signs for Lottie while she edged toward the lift. "Lottie, thank the Captain for the-"

"Hold on. I haven't forgotten your errand, Fraulein – ehrm, Maria," he fumbled. He dug a small card from his pocket, reached for the telephone, and gave the operator a number.

Maria and Lottie began meandering about the elegant salon, open mouthed with wonder at its lavish furnishings. Big leather armchairs and richly upholstered settees were arranged atop a plush carpet which floated like an island on the marble floor. At one end of the salon, near the vacant bedroom, a gleaming mahogany table and chairs ran below windows that offered a panoramic view of Salzburg's skyline. At the other end, past the lift doors, stood an elaborately carved cabinet, fitted out with a bar and even a phonograph! Nearby was the massive desk where the Captain stood, telephone to his ear, tapping his foot impatiently.

The suite was luxurious, but with none of the trappings of a home – no books, no photographs, no kitchen to even fix a cup of tea – it was also cold and impersonal. Maria looked about for signs of the Baroness' presence and tried, but not very hard, to avoid eavesdropping.

"Max? Listen, you said if I needed anything – well, yes, fine. Listen, Max, do you remember Fraulein Maria? Yes, the children's governess, the last one before-"

A pause.

"Well, she isn't there, not anymore, anyway. She's apparently been – well, I don't know where, but now she's back in Salzburg. With a – her child. Yes, a little girl. They need a place to stay, something safe, and affordable, and decent, and I was hoping that you might know of something-".

He turned his back to her and lowered his voice, but Maria could still pick up bits of the conversation.

"Never mind about that, Max. _Married,_ for heaven's sake – I don't know! Yes, I remember, but that was a very long time ago – far too old -"

He turned back toward Maria with a stiff, apologetic smile.

"Yes, Max, but what harm could it do? Why don't you give me the information, and I'll pass it along."

Maria watched as he jotted down some notes and rang off.

"Max didn't have much to offer. The housing situation is apparently quite appalling. There's one place he's heard about," here, he extended the scrap of paper to her, "but only third-hand, and he is concerned that it might not be suitable. He's on his way out of town in the morning, but if it can wait till he returns, he recommended you let him see it for himself first."

"Oh, no, Captain. I wouldn't want to impose. It's very kind of both of you." She tucked the slip of paper into her pocket. "We'll get ourselves over there immediately. Thank you again for the treat. Lottie, darling," she made a few hasty signs, "say thank you to the Captain, and goodbye."

As the lift's doors slid closed, Maria couldn't help craning her neck for one last glimpse of the Captain. It had affected her more than she wanted to admit, seeing him again. She hadn't thought about it this way before, but all the events of the last eight years had been set in motion by their dance in the garden. She was grateful that things had turned out so well for his children, curious as to his wife's whereabouts, and full of renewed hope that things would somehow work out well for her and Lottie.

**OOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**

**But what about-? And why-? And where-? All will be revealed in good time! Thank you for the lovely reviews and how nice to hear from so many of my old readers!**

**Having already apologized for underrepresenting Europe's painful postwar recovery, I will now apologize for any shortcomings in the way this story will portray Lottie and her education. I know a little bit about this subject, did a bit of research and talked to a teacher I know who works with deaf children, but I'm definitely going to need some license for dear Lottie. No more apologies after this one, though.**

**Don't own, all for love, etc. **

**OOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**


	3. Strictly Business

**STRICTLY BUSINESS**

Two final matching, enchanting smiles from mother and child, two identical, airy waves, and then Maria and Lottie were in the lift and out of sight, leaving the cavernous suite feel even emptier than before.

Georg's mind turned back to the frustrating news that work on the villa would be delayed. It was really little more than an inconvenience, he told himself. Surely he could occupy himself for a few weeks! There was, for example, his promise to the children, which was a matter he needed to tend to personally, although he'd pictured doing so while the bustle and noise of the work crews surrounded him. Going out there alone was a different matter entirely: the place was sure to be teeming with ghosts.

If nothing else, the delay would allow him a necessary rest. For he was exhausted, after eight years of holding his family together while they'd been virtually imprisoned in Switzerland. Yet since the war's end, he'd been strangely restless, too, driven to revisit post-war Paris, London, New York, Istanbul, Rome, Milan, Chicago, Vienna and now, when he couldn't put it off any longer, Salzburg. It was here in Salzburg that his heart had been broken and put back together one too many times, first by the loss of the Empire, then by Agathe's death, and then by the Nazis. The final blow had landed at the end of that last golden summer, darkness descending just as he had his children restored to him, just as the world had begun to seem bright again, and full of promise. No, the country he had fought for had turned her back on him. Having given her so much, only to have any hope for her future repeatedly shattered to bits, he was done with Austria for good.

Knowing what Max had been through, and conscious of the horror he had barely escaped, Georg couldn't exactly begrudge the man his second chance, but he did resent everyone _else_ in Salzburg, for the way they'd simply moved on. For himself, Georg couldn't possibly summon the will or energy to help rebuild Austria, whose best years were clearly behind her. The very thought gave him a headache.

As had Max's insistent questions about the little governess, which had been peppered throughout their brief telephone call. There was no denying that at one time, he had found the girl nearly irresistible. If it hadn't been for her vocation, her innocence, and her youth – Georg felt a pinch of guilt, knowing that given those things, he ought not to have flirted with her so irresponsibly while she was under his protection. It certainly hadn't helped things with Elsa. But for Max to suggest that there was any lingering business there? Fraulein Maria, or whatever her name was now, had only grown lovelier in the last eight years, but she was clearly bearing the burden of a complicated past, and in any event Georg was past that kind of foolishness now. Now that his children had put down roots, he was wanted nothing more than to settle among them and become a grandfather.

By now, the room had filled with violet shadows. Georg poured himself a drink and considered going out to dinner, but he was leery of running into any more ghosts, real or imagined, and a glance down at passers-by in the street unfurling umbrellas, and trees swaying in the distant park, convinced him to order dinner up to his room instead.

By the time he retired, rain pattered steadily against the big windows. Listening to the soothing sound, his mind wandered back to his encounter with Fraulein – but no, if he were to encounter her again, he'd have to remember to call her by name, Maria, even though the idea seemed too intimate somehow. The girl had skillfully evaded any questions about why she'd run away all those years ago, as well as when or why she'd left Nonnberg Abbey, and where she'd been since.

And the little girl! A sweet child indeed, but only now did Georg let himself acknowledge the obvious: for there to have been a child, there must have been a man somewhere along the line. A husband. Despite the evidence, he wasn't sure he wanted to believe it: the idea was vaguely distasteful.

He slept fitfully, jarred awake repeatedly by the howling wind and the rain that began to batter at the windows, pounding relentlessly, so loudly that it took a few moments for him to hear the chimes that signaled the lift's arrival. When Georg stumbled out into the salon, not bothering to turn on the lights, his mind searched for just the right curse to fling at Max for having interrupted his sleep. But the lift doors opened to reveal not Max, but Maria in her golden suit, saturated with rain, holding little Charlotte clasped to her chest. Damp curls lay lank against the two wet faces, and a large puddle had already formed at their feet.

"Fra – Maria? What the-"

"I'm sorry, Captain, but Lottie and I cannot _possibly _be expected to live in a – a – a place like that," she announced, sweeping past him into the suite.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your friend Herr Detweiler sent us to a brothel, I think you'd call it. A place where-"

"I know what a brothel is. And Max had his doubts about the establishment, if you'll recall. You're welcome to stay here tonight," Georg offered, somewhat irrelevantly, since Maria was already leading Lottie toward the unoccupied bedroom.

"Come, Lottie darling," her hands signed with a graceful flutter. "A nice warm bath for you, and then I'll tuck you into bed. Doesn't this look lovely, so cozy and comfortable?"

Georg went into his room, retrieved his dressing gown, and returned to the salon, where he poured himself a whiskey and waited for Maria to reappear.

"Do you always drink so much?" she asked.

"Are you always so rude to people who have taken you in off the street?" he countered.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I suppose I'm just-" she wrapped her arms around herself, not that anyone so thoroughly soaked to the skin could possibly warm herself that way. "Oh, Captain, it was _awful!" _she burst out. "I knew there was something off about the place from the start, but I didn't want to believe it! First, the – ehrm – landlady told me she couldn't possibly take us, that Lottie would be frightened by some especially noisy guests, and when I explained that she wouldn't be able hear anything, she gave me the queerest look, shrugged, and quoted me an hourly rent. I knew better, but I was so tired, and all I wanted was for us to-" she faltered to a stop, but failed to hide the quaver in her voice.

"Where are your things?"

"We had to leave them there," she said dully, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

"You're going to catch cold in those wet clothes. Here, take this," he extended the dressing gown to her, "until your clothes dry."

She stared at his outstretched arm as though he'd offered her poison.

"Frau – ehrm, Maria. If you are all that child has, you cannot afford to get sick."

Glaring at him, she snatched the garment away and stalked into the bedroom to change. Meanwhile, he called downstairs for a pot of tea and some sandwiches, and ordered the clerk to send someone over to Maria's former lodgings to retrieve her belongings.

When she emerged, lost in the folds of his oversized dressing gown, she sank into the sofa and inhaled three sandwiches and a cup of tea without stopping.

"So how did you finally figure it out? About your accommodations, I mean."

"The walls were quite thin," she said with a tight-lipped smile, and then took a long draught of tea, as though to ward off any more questions. He had to stifle a laugh when her cheeks went red. For a married woman swanning about Salzburg in a stylish suit, Georg would have expected her to see the humor in the antics of the couple on the other side of the wall.

"Well," he cleared his throat. "It's late. Get a good night's sleep, and we'll sort things out in the morning."

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

When he awakened, the rain had stopped, and the suite was flooded with lemon-yellow morning sun. Maria and Lottie's scant luggage had been delivered and sat waiting in the suite's entryway. But even after he'd washed and dressed, there was no sign of his guests behind their bedroom door at the far end of the suite. When he stopped in the lobby to order breakfast delivered upstairs, he learned to his great annoyance that no driver was available to take him to the St. Rupert cemetery.

"There's plenty of cars, sir, you see. I can have one here by lunchtime. But there's no drivers to be had, you see. Not a man available-"

"Yes, yes, I know all about that," Georg said impatiently.

To fill the hours before lunchtime, he struck out on some errands, watching warily for ghosts that might lurk on every corner. First off, he sent off wires to the children, letting them know of the delay, and filling them in about Max. He considering mentioning that he'd encountered their former governess, but this was likely to raise so many questions he didn't know the answer to, that he kept that news to himself. Then, bowing to reality – he'd be stuck in Salzburg for at least two weeks, it seemed – he hunted down his old haberdasher. The man was back in business and delighted to open early and provide one of his favorite customers enough clothing for the extended stay. Elsa's favorite dress shop was still shuttered, but the jeweler's was open for business, although the window displays held only a few cheap watches. Georg hurried by, shaking off the memory of his last visit there, when he'd bought that enormous ring.

When he returned to the suite, he found his entourage expanded yet again: there were now four people seated around the big table by the window. Lottie, red hair neatly braided, was sharing an enormous pastry with a dark-curled moppet of similar age. Maria, her hair back in its orderly knot and wearing a cheerful red-and-white polka-dotted shirtwaist, chattered away in an animated fashion to another young woman, whose dark eyes scrutinized him from behind spectacles that sat perched on a sharp nose.

Without waiting for an introduction, the woman rose and extended her hand. "How do you do? I'm Clara Armstrong." Her German was distinctly British-accented, her manner direct, and her handshake was firmer than any woman's he'd ever known.

"Georg von Trapp. _Captain_ von Trapp. This is my suite, as it happens."

"Oh, Captain," Maria interrupted. "Clara is the teacher I told you about, remember? She's governess to an American family whose daughter is also deaf, and she has been kind enough to also teach me how to help Lottie. And that's their little girl, Susan. I do hope you don't mind the intrusion."

What else could he say? He ought to have been annoyed, but he always welcomed an opportunity to speak English, with its fond connections to Agathe's memory.

"You're English?" he turned to his guest, whose face immediately brightened as she explained that she'd grown up near London, but she had spent the war in Switzerland. It was her dream, she explained, to open a school for deaf children, "like our Susan, but also including those of modest means," but it would cost a great deal, a dream like that, and meanwhile she tried to help Maria, on her days out-

"I brought you these books," Clara addressed Maria, switching seamlessly back to German. "But let me show you the lesson first, shall I?"

He helped himself to breakfast, watching with interest as the lip-reading lesson proceeded, which involved the little girls patting at the women's mouths and throats while they engaged in made-up conversations: "How do you do?" and "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?" And in between the lip-reading, there was something lovely about the signs, the way two small and two larger pairs of hands gently stirred the air.

When it was time for Clara and Susan to depart, there was no missing the awkwardness when Maria turned out her wallet before apologizing.

"For the books – ehrm - I'm a bit short, Clara, but I promise, the next time, when I've had a chance to find a job-"

"Let me take care of that," he said easily, digging into his pocket, and waving away Maria's objections. "You can pay me back when you get work."

While Clara lingered at the door, holding Susan firmly by the hand and giving Maria last-minute instructions about homework, Georg helped himself to a cup of coffee and settled into one of the big leather armchairs. Lottie, a book tucked under her arm, parked herself directly in front of him and regarded him calmly. She had her mother's blue eyes and freckles, although he supposed that the red hair must have come from her father. After a minute, as though she'd allowed him enough time to study her, the girl removed the coffee cup from his hand, carefully settled it on a nearby table, and crawled into his lap.

The girl was feather-light, not the solid bundle Gretl had been, but more like Marta, who had always been so delicate. But Lottie, unlike Marta, was a lapful of wiry energy. When she gestured impatiently toward the book, he began to read aloud. Ironically, she had chosen a tale about a sailor bound for magical lands, while he, who had at one time actually been a sailor, was marooned here in Salzburg. And he couldn't help feeling vaguely foolish to catch himself adopting flamboyant gestures and facial expressions to make up for her inability to hear him.

But Lottie gifted him with the smile of an angel and squirmed into a position where she could follow along, glancing back and forth between the words on the page and where her fingers lay gently against the shape of his mouth. It seemed that it was possible to read even to a child who couldn't hear you, after all. "He set sail for a far-away island where rubies grew on trees," Georg read slowly, and after that he was too preoccupied to feel foolish, wondering about the child, and her mother, where they had been during the war, where their husband and father was. If he was even still alive. If he existed at all.

When he looked up at last, Maria was watching them, hands on her hips and a fond smile on her face. She still had that lively, impish quality he remembered so well, but now there was a steely confidence about the little governess that had previously been lacking, and an appealing roundness to her figure.

Lottie, impatient, was filling the air with signed questions.

"He hasn't got one anymore," Maria signed, laughing, explaining to Georg, "I told her that you were a sea captain, and now she wants to know where is your boat." She paused, momentarily awkward. "I'm sorry if that – ehrm-"

"No, no, it's fine," he reassured her. "I don't look at all like a sea captain, anyway. Can you explain to her, about submarines?"

"Yes, I will, but first, I must thank you for the loan, Captain. I'm quite aware that we've already been an imposition, and I do intend to look for work. You recall that I was trained as a teacher. Imagine if Clara were able to open her school? Perhaps that would make it possible for Lottie to attend! But first things first. I'll take any work that's offered me."

"Too bad you're not a man," he said grimly. Lottie, as though sensing his darkening mood, slid from his lap and disappeared into the bedroom. "I could use some help at the villa. I thought that my offer of work would be a godsend, and now I find myself queueing up in hope of getting any help at all. I am anxious to finish up here and move on. To New York, because of Liesl and the baby."

"What exactly needs doing?"

"I haven't seen the place myself, but from what my solicitor said, it's a matter of hauling away trash, and some of the furnishings, cleaning things up, washing the windows. Seeing that things are in order - the lighting fixtures, the plumbing, and the stoves. Tidying the garden."

"I could do some of those things!"

"Don't be ridiculous, Frau – I mean, Maria." He let out an exasperated sigh. "Have you forgotten just how big the place is?"

"I suppose," she shrugged. "But if I can be of any help-"

"Hold on!" His head snapped up. "There _is_ something you could do, a small errand out at the villa. I suspect that the bastards likely thoroughly looted the place, but I promised the children that I'd check to see if there is anything left of sentimental value - my wife's jewelry, pictures, that sort of thing. We took only a few pictures with us when we fled."

"But how on earth could I be expected to know what to take? Or where to look?"

"Come, now, Maria," he rolled his eyes. "You spent hours with them up in the attic, going through her things, listening to them talk about her."

"You knew about that?"

"I did," he chuckled. "How about it, Fraulein? Can you help me out?"

"I suppose I could," Maria said doubtfully. "I'd have to take Lottie with me."

"Then it's all settled. Here," he reached again for his wallet and laid several crisp bills out on the table, "let me pay you in advance. The driver will take you and Charlotte there after lunch," but then he bit back a curse when he remembered that there would be a car, but no driver.

He was going to have to face his fears in Aigen after all, but at least he'd have company.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

They rode to Aigen in a little red convertible the Captain had arranged for, and whose gay appearance mocked its occupants' subdued mood. Even Lottie, tucked into a miniscule back seat, kept her hands neatly folded in her lap, a deaf child's version of sealed lips. The stiff March breeze bit at their cheeks, a reminder that they had not yet left winter behind for spring's new beginnings. Maria twisted the heavy ring on her finger, around and around and around again, while she let her thoughts drift back to the night eight years ago when she'd run away, leaving behind the bright commotion of Baroness Schrader's party, slipping through the great entry doors into the stillness of a late-summer night. Not to mention that she had left behind her heart, though at the time, she'd been numb, with only the occasional spear of sorrow or panic breaking through.

_No. _

She forced her mind to turn back a few months more, to the very first time she'd traveled to the villa, in that awful dress and the big leather hat. She still remembered how the chatty bus driver had distracted her until she'd stumbled out into the road and danced her way between the trees, brimming with false bravado. Her lips curved into a smile at the thought of how surprised that Maria would be now, to find herself returning, tucked into a small, bright-red convertible, with the wind on her face, her lovely little girl in the back seat, both of them chauffeured by none other than the once-fearsome Captain von Trapp, who was still irritable but really had been nothing but kind and generous to them.

When the car pulled into the circular drive, Maria stole a look at the Captain, but his face betrayed no emotion as he helped Lottie from the car, reached into his pocket and produced a key, which he handed to Maria.

"You go on in," he told her.

"Hold on," she narrowed her eyes, "you mean you're not coming with us?"

"There's no need for that," he said brusquely, "you have your orders," and he folded himself back into the driver's seat, started the engine with a roar and tore away with a squeal of tires.

The man was a coward, Maria thought, although she had to admit to a stab of misgiving herself as she fit the key into the lock. Anyway, she reminded herself sternly, the Captain's generous pay for one afternoon's work would help her meet Petersen's demands.

The great doors swung open, revealing the sun-drenched foyer. The shock of seeing it after all these years was muted by its dusty disorder and faded grandeur: papers and books lay in drifts, stained carpeting covered patches of the marble floor, and the great chandeliers sagged with burnt-out bulbs. Discarded telephone equipment and typewriters were strewn across rickety tables, along with ledgers, pens and a few teacups. Whoever had occupied this place had left in a hurry.

The thought of those men sent a shiver down Maria's spine. When she forced her eyes upward, seeking a distraction, there was a moment when she thought she saw the children as they'd been that first day, six von Trapps marching out of the nursery and down the stairs, while Brigitta wandered in from the library, her nose in a book. Only a few months later, she'd watched them climb back up the same stairs, waving to their father's guests as the last notes of their song faded away. She had seen them only once after that, the day they'd visited the Abbey and told her about their father's marriage; she hadn't seen them since, not for eight long years.

"Right. Well, then, Lottie, let's get on with it. Starting with the attic."

They climbed the stairs, one flight after another, while Maria looked all around for signs of Baroness Schrader. Baroness von Trapp, she reminded herself firmly. When they reached their destination, the thin March light from two windows under the eaves barely penetrated the musty-smelling space. But it was sufficient for Maria to see that the Germans had apparently lost interest in the villa after the second story, for the attic appeared untouched, as though protected by some kind of magic spell. After another brief flash of memory – was that Kurt and Louisa playing tag in the cavernous space? - she got to work, sorting through trunkfuls of memorabilia.

Here and there she found something to save – piles of photographs of the family in happier times, a small model submarine for one of the boys, strings of beads and hair clips for the girls. She kept Lottie busy packing up her findings and making piles of the rest of it, and gave herself over to memories of the hours she'd spent up here with the children. After an hour, she had methodically worked her way to the far attic wall, where a closet rail ran the length of the space. Hanging there, as though they'd been waiting for her return, were seven neatly-pressed uniforms she still remembered banishing to the attic as soon as she'd finished fashioning their first set of playclothes. Another memory to smile at!

On the same rail, along with a few outgrown coats and a moth-eaten fur stole, were two items that she remembered had repeatedly drawn the children back to the attic. "Just to look," she'd had to warn them, "No, darlings, you can't try them on." There was the Captain's naval uniform, gleaming with braid and brass buttons. Next, Agathe von Trapp's wedding gown, tiny, exquisitely fashioned, lavish with lace, and scored with dozens of tiny buttons down the back. Even with the billowing train neatly pinned up, it was too big to qualify as a souvenir, so Maria was about to turn away when she noticed a second dress.

Like the wedding dress, it was white, also, but the resemblance ended there. This one was a simple sheath of nubbled raw silk with a matching jacket, made for a taller and curvier woman, and if there was any doubt as to its origins, a large tag swung from the hanger, proclaiming, "ELSA SCHRADER WEDDING DRESS."

"That's enough." Maria turned abruptly toward the stairs and signaled Lottie for attention. "We have what we came for." The girl had fit their treasures neatly into an old dress box, which she insisted on carrying herself, back down several flights of stairs, until they reached the foyer.

Maria was so busy looking about for other signs of the Baroness that she didn't immediately notice that Lottie had disappeared. But the ballroom door was cracked temptingly open, just wide enough for a slender child to slip through. When Maria peered into the gloom, just like she had that very first day years ago, there was Lottie, bounding across the floor, leaping and twirling. Although to Maria, the ballroom looked just as sadly dilapidated as it had the first time, she could understand Lottie's excitement.

"Does a princess live here?" the girl signed excitedly.

"It's a ballroom. No, not that kind of ball," she smiled at Lottie's puzzled face, "A ball is an elegant sort of party. The women in sparkling jewels, and long colorful dresses, and the men-"

Maria stopped short at the sight of the terrace through the French doors, where she thought she saw the handsome host partnering a young girl under the stars, twirling her about, gliding across the garden before drawing her closer, spinning and spinning, dizzy with heat and light and his breath on her face-

"I want to dance!" Lottie interrupted, signing with one hand and tugging at Maria's skirts at the other. Lottie loved watching people dance, and to dance herself, moving with a strangely graceful rhythm for someone who couldn't hear the music. Laughing, Maria took her by both hands and spun them both about in wide circles, humming a scrap of music to herself, stopping to show Lottie how to sink into a deep curtsy.

_**BANG!**_

The ballroom doors flew open with such force that Lottie must have felt it through the soles of her feet, because the girl's eyes grew wide with fright at the tall figure looming threateningly in the shadowy doorway.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**

**Thank you for the lovely reviews. Special thanks to marzz for encouraging support and advice on matters related to the education of deaf children, and to Chez Lui for her gracious patience with me. I don't own TSOM or anything about it. **

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**


	4. Aigen

**AIGEN**

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

_**BANG!**_

_The ballroom doors flew open with such force that Lottie must have felt it through the soles of her feet, because the girl's eyes grew wide with fright at the tall figure looming threateningly in the shadowy doorway._

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

Captain von Trapp, his figure intimidating and austere, stepped aside silently to let them exit. But as Maria and Lottie scurried from the ballroom, there was no missing the trace of a smile lingering at the corners of his mouth.

Once they were back in the brightly lit foyer, the Captain made a remarkable sight. Not only had he had shed his jacket and tie and rolled his sleeves up over his elbows, but his flushed face gleamed with sweat and his hair clung damply to his forehead.

"Why do you stare at me that way?" he demanded.

"Where have you _been_, Captain?"

"I went to the cemetery. To visit my wife's grave. Why?"

"What on earth happened to you?" Maria blurted. He looked as though he'd rolled about on the gravesite, but she couldn't imagine him giving into his grief in such a fashion.

"Oh. Well," he looked down and examined the toes of his polished black boots with great intensity. "I was on my way back here to collect the two of you, and upon reflection, I realized that – ehrm – it must have seemed rather cowardly, the way I abandoned you at the front door. I resolved to seek you out and apologize for my behavior, but once I got myself inside and passed the library, it suddenly occurred to me that there were some volumes of my father's that held special meaning for me, and that I hoped might have survived. I stopped in there, and the next thing I knew, I seem to have found myself," he looked down at his rumpled clothing, "why don't you come see for yourself?"

As the three of them crossed the foyer, Maria noticed his gaze drifting to where the large Austrian flag had hung so proudly.

"It must be hard for you, being here," she said tentatively.

"Not really," he shrugged, tearing his eyes away from the blank white wall, "it's not as awful as I expected. With everyone gone away, and the chaos those animals left behind, it's not the same place anymore, not really."

The library: where Captain von Trapp had reigned from behind the massive desk, challenging Maria's every decision about the children, but somehow making her a better teacher than she'd been before. Where she had found refuge among more books than she'd ever dreamed could exist. Now, there was a mountain of trash heaped by the French doors alongside a few rickety chairs. Torn and stained draperies had been pulled down and piled in the corner, while two enormous rugs had been rolled up and stood sentry against the far wall. A neat stack of a half-dozen volumes stood in the center of the enormous desk, which had been cleared and wiped clean of dust.

"I straightened the place out myself," he explained. "Couldn't bear to see the mess they'd made of it. I put aside those books to take away, and got the rest of it ready for the haulers. _If _any ever materialize, that is. The rest of the books, the better furnishings, my solicitor can worry about. And I got to thinking – if you'd be willing, I mean you _are_ looking for work – we could come out here again and do some more of it. Pile up trash, wash windows, tidy the garden, that kind of thing, while waiting for crews to do the heavier bits, and – Fraulein? I mean Maria. Are you listening to me?"

Maria was watching what appeared to be Brigitta, climbing the library ladders, an act that was strictly forbidden.

"What? Oh, yes, of course, Captain. I was just-" she swallowed, "never mind."

"What is it?"

"It's just that – do you see them?"

"Them?"

"People who don't belong where you're seeing them," Maria explained. "I know it sounds foolish, but the whole time I've been here today, I've imagined seeing the children. And – and other people." No need to mention that, just moments ago, she thought she had glimpsed Baroness Schrader through the French doors, setting out for a stroll along the lake. What had happened between the Baroness and the Captain, anyway?

She was relieved by the Captain's grim bark of a laugh.

"It happens to me all the time, Maria."

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

And just like that, Georg's new life fell into place.

Maria readily accepted his offer: until a work crew became available, in return for her assistance at the villa, she and Lottie would stay in the suite's second bedroom and take their meals with him. When he added a cash stipend to the deal, she muttered a token protest, but it wasn't hard to see how she went pale with what he was quite certain was relief. What was Maria going to do with all that money? he wondered.

Every morning after breakfast, they drove out to Aigen with a packed luncheon and spent the day working. The ghosts were still with him: on any given day, looking out the window, Georg might spy Kurt climbing a tree by the lake, or Friedrich and Louisa racing each other across the lawn. But, unlike the old visions – Elsa, Agathe, Max, even Maria, popping up in places they could not possibly be - somehow, these ghosts belonged here, children from a lost past who had come home to a place that existed only in memory. And as Lottie frolicked about the deserted, dilapidated villa, her antics filled the empty rooms with a kind of joy that made what might have been a sad errand, more bearable.

As the days and then weeks went by, though, Lottie more frequently stayed behind to spend the day in Salzburg with Clara Armstrong and her young charge, Susan. Maria fretted at the imposition, despite Clara's reassurance, "but it is good for the two girls, to be making friends, it forces them to learn to communicate in more challenging circumstances, don't you see, Maria?"

And when Maria worried out loud about the imposition on Georg – the luxurious accommodations, the generous pay for menial work, the meals delivered to the suite within minutes of a telephone call – it was his turn to reassure her.

"You and Max are always after me to do something for dear Austria, and having spirited my fortune away to England before the war, aren't you glad to see me returning some of it?" Although he paid her extravagantly for their work days at the villa, he quietly noted that she bought nothing for herself; she apparently owned no clothing besides the elegant golden suit and two polka-dotted shirtwaists, the one in red and its twin in green, which she wore on alternate days.

"Some of the better shops have reopened," he told her one day, "why don't you buy yourself something? A new dress, or a hat, perhaps?"

"No, I'll be all right," she said easily. "I'm saving up for – ehrm – for a – well, a journey. One I hope to take with Lottie someday."

On a few occasions, he left Maria alone for an hour to visit Agathe's gravesite. Not that Georg was the sort to chat up a headstone, but it gave him a certain satisfaction to note that the tearing grief had been replaced by a sort of wistful acceptance. And he wanted to reassure himself that the arrangements he'd made for its maintenance, so faithfully honored during the war, would still be followed after he'd left Austria for good.

Without Lottie to distract them, he and Maria were a fearsomely efficient team, methodically working their way through the great salon, the dining room, the nursery, the servants' wing and the kitchen, separating trash from valuables, retrieving a few small treasures for his family, cleaning, sweeping, dusting, and washing the filthy windows. Maria made a charming picture in her colorful shirtwaists, with her long curls tied up in a kerchief and her freckles peeping out from beneath smudges of dirt. When she expressed surprise that a man with his aristocratic roots took so easily to menial work, he found himself regaling her with tales of the rough life on submarines during the Great War. In return, she told him stories of her childhood on her uncle's farm, and he marveled that a childhood devoid of love, with even the most basic necessities grudgingly given, had not turned her bitter. And, of course, Maria was always anxious for news of the von Trapp children, and Georg welcomed the opportunity to speak of them, not only their present lives, but their experiences Switzerland during the war.

It was while Maria was sweeping up broken dishes in the kitchen, and he was, to his great satisfaction, managing to repair the wiring behind the great ovens, that he told her about the time Agathe had tried to make apple strudel. "When Cook told her that it was a mistake for anyone born outside Austria to even attempt it, Agathe threatened to dismiss her! Oh, she could make biscuits with the children, and a proper English trifle, and scones and such," he said with a rueful smile, "but let's just say that strudel was never going to be her strong point," adding after a moment, "what are you staring at, Maria?"

"Hm? Oh, well. It's just that you tell stories about her so easily now. The children's mother, I mean. Back when – ehrm, I mean, that summer, you barely spoke of her. And when you did, the subject was changed as quickly as possible. As though you were afraid of her memory."

"Afraid?" he bristled. "Have you forgotten who you're talking to?"

"I think it's been good for you, Captain, to come back here. It's just like Reverend Mother used to tell me. You've got to face your fears."

"Face my fears?" Georg snapped. Something inside him, something childish and resentful he'd barely been aware of, burst open. "Face my _fears_? While we're talking about facing your fears, is that what you did, running away in the middle of the night and abandoning my children? Why, Maria? What was it that made you run away to the Abbey?"

He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. Because he knew perfectly well what she'd been afraid of: him, and of the sparks that flew between them, and that damned dance. The Laendler. By speaking aloud, he'd acknowledged a shameful truth, one he'd managed to bury for eight years, leaving it safely beyond his memory's reach.

"The reason no longer exists," was all she said, quietly, before turning away from him and slipping out the back door and into the garden.

Georg gave her a minute's lead and then followed, wanting to make peace. She didn't acknowledge his presence as he trailed behind her through the ruined garden, where no vestige remained of the carefully manicured lawns and greenery he'd once taken such pride in. But now that they were well into April, the air was milder, and once they reached the path along the lake, there was comfort to be found in the green-fuzzed trees and a playful breeze that sent ripples across the water.

"Next time Lottie is with us, I ought to take her out in the canoe," Maria observed.

He would take the olive branch extended to him, then.

"Not on your life," he said lightly, "If anyone's taking Lottie out on the water, it will be me. Have you forgotten what happened the first time you took the children out – watch out!" he called, but it was too late, as the breeze tore Maria's kerchief from her head and sent it skimming out onto the lake. She let out a curse.

"Listen to you, swearing like a sailor!" he chuckled. "Glad to see you've learned something from me!" But he couldn't take his eyes from her long blond curls, which blew about wildly, despite her efforts to confine them.

"Don't you laugh at me!" Maria was laughing too. "It will take me a week to get the tangles brushed out of it! Let's go back inside so I can find another cover for it."

"I've got a better idea. Turn around."

"What?"

"Turn around," Georg motioned, and when he had her wary obedience, he came up behind her, took a deep breath, smoothed back her errant mane, and began to braid. Left over middle, right over middle, and so on, letting the orderly rhythm of it distract him from the silk slipping like water through his fingers.

"Where did you learn how to braid hair?" she asked, sounding the slightest bit breathless. "It's from learning all those sailors' knots, is it?"

Left over right, right over middle, repeat.

"No, it's from having five daughters and no governess. I had the whole war to perfect my braiding skills." He waited, biding his time, and then, "Maria?"

"Hm?"

Left over right, right over middle, repeat. Slowly now, stretching out the task.

"I apologize. For prying."

"It's all right. Captain. It's just that you _are _rather secretive yourself, you know."

Hadn't she just complimented him for talking so freely about Agathe? But he was in no mood to bicker.

"Maria, do you think – I mean, now that we are working together so well –you could use my given name, you know. As you are so fond of pointing out, you are not one of the men under my command."

She was silent for so long that he reached the end of his task. When he gave the golden rope a last little tug, a visible shiver ran down her back, and then only then did she answer.

"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't do that. It would be too-"

She didn't have to finish the sentence. After eight years, their roles were cemented into place. To her, Georg would always be "the Captain," just as she, although widowed with a daughter of her own, would always be his little governess. Although if she'd been _only_ that – a prim and pious governess, - he'd barely have noticed her eight years ago and would certainly have forgotten her by now. It was her complexity that had infuriated and intrigued him. Even back then, she'd been a bit of an enigma.

On the drive back to Salzburg, he ticked thru the mysteries in his mind. There was, of course, the question of why a girl like Maria had ever thought she was born to live inside a cloister in the first place. Moreover, she'd made very clear that she did not welcome inquiries into the circumstances that had caused her to flee the villa eight years ago, and had led her away from Nonnberg Abbey and into marriage and motherhood. She was silent on her whereabouts during the war, and why she'd chosen to return to Salzburg. "Please don't ask me that," and "the reason no longer exists," she had told him repeatedly. Georg found it impossible even to imagine what sort of man Maria would have married. And what had become of this hypothetical husband? Was he dead? Had he been a spy, or a collaborator?

Once they arrived back at the hotel, he set his questions aside in favor of a shot or two of whiskey, and let himself be drawn into the cozy routines that seemed to have established themselves under odd circumstances: a collection of unrelated individuals whose paths crossed in what had previously seemed a cavernous and impersonal hotel suite and somehow created an atmosphere of warmth and welcome.

Here was Clara Armstrong, accompanied by her charge, Susan, returning Lottie to Maria's care and stopping to chat with Georg about everything from postwar England's slow recovery, to the small steps she was taking toward her dream of a school for deaf children. He admired the woman's initiative, her quick mind and precise English diction, and found himself offering to introduce her to the Mayor. Perhaps the idea of the school would distract the man, who had sent a number of letters to the hotel, pestering Georg to become involved in Salzburg's affairs.

Meanwhile, the two little girls gamboled about the suite, filling the space with such spirited energy that Georg barely noticed the absence of laughter and chatter. Their visits were delightful reminders of the years when his daughters had been young.

And here was Max, turning up in time for supper as usual, bearing new records for the phonograph in return for the hospitality. Although his highest hopes were for his real estate ventures, he continued to follow the entertainment business as post-war New York began to export its theatrical successes out to a slowly recovering Europe.

"Listen to this one! It's from the biggest hit on Broadway!" he'd announce, or "can't you just see the crowds dancing to this one?" and he would turn the volume up, until Lottie and Susan felt the vibrations and gifted Max with wide smiles.

Despite his initial frustration at having been stranded in Salzburg, the arrangements suited Georg, so much so that, just as spring burst into its full glory all around them, he began to feel something warm and tender blossom within, especially when it came to Lottie. The red-headed sprite flitted through life as though unaffected by her handicap. She was bright, inquisitive, naughty, lively, stubborn and possessed of a winsome charm that captivated every one she met. Given Maria's prickly insistence on privacy, he dared not inquire about Lottie's condition – had she been born deaf? Had they consulted the very best doctors available? Georg kept these questions to himself, instead taking an interest in mastering enough basic signs that he could communicate a bit with her, and willingly offered himself as a model for her lip-reading practice.

Georg found himself relaxing in Maria's presence as well. Their friendship, seeded by his gratitude for what she'd done for his family long ago, had now firmly taken root. He continued to be fascinated by the way that the old Maria had been so completely replaced by the new one; not that the old Maria had been timid or retiring, but she had been transparent, while the new Maria seemed encased by a sort of tough shell that had developed during the war years, a shell that only very rarely cracked.

One such rare instance occurred one late afternoon in early May, as he sat by the big window, a generous pour of whiskey at his elbow, reading the evening paper. He hadn't really been listening to Maria and Clara chattering in the background, until he heard his name mentioned.

"Lottie. _No_," he heard Maria say, with an uncharacteristic sharp edge to her voice, "You mustn't say such things! Captain von Trapp is not-"

At the sound of his name, Georg's gaze swung in their direction just in time to see Maria and Clara exchange uneasy glances over the girls' heads.

"I'm not what?"

"Never mind," Maria told him, "it's not important."

"Me? _I'm_ not important?" he laughed, but he was brought up short by the bright spots of color that appeared on Maria's cheeks.

"I don't want you asking me again, Lottie!" Maria's signed movements stabbed angrily at the air. "He is _not, _and that's all there is to it. Now, have you washed your face as I repeatedly asked you to?" Without another word, she took Lottie by the hand and marched her into their shared bedroom.

"I'm not what?" he asked Clara.

Sighing, Clara removed her spectacles, gave them a polish with her handkerchief, and returned them to her nose.

"Lottie seems to think that you are her father."

"But that's ridiculous!" he sputtered, feeling mortified for no good reason at all.

"For heaven's sake, Captain, of course it's ridiculous! I know _that_." Georg tried not to take offense when Clara rolled her eyes. Was the idea really _so_ preposterous? "The little one just wants to be loved. And so does her mother, for that matter."

The questions surged to his lips while he forced himself to project an air of mild indifference.

"So Maria was – ehrm – she and Lottie were all on their own when you first knew them?"

"Oh, yes! Maria is a wonderful mother, anyone can see that, but she was quite the merrymaker back then. Not that she was the type to kiss and tell, or at least not the telling part of it," Clara said with a grin and a wink. "Only the best champagne for our girl, and on the dance floor?" Then her expression grew grave and tender. "But you could see the hurt below the surface." Her eyes slid to the other end of the suite, where Maria and Lottie remained behind the closed bedroom door. "She didn't talk about him much."

"Her husband, you mean?" Georg prompted. "What do you know of him?"

"Enough to know that it broke her heart, what happened with him. I mean, there were other men, but nothing like - Once, when she'd had a few glasses too many of champagne, she told me that -"

Georg wanted to know more, but at the same time he didn't, so he was relieved and disappointed all at once when, just then, the elevator chimes sounded, and Max arrived in time for supper as usual, bearing an armload of phonograph records.

"More new American imports, Max?"

"No, no," Max said, "These are actually from Austria, before the war. Courtesy of a friend of a friend who acquired them by – well, never mind that. I'll bet you'll remember this one," he added slyly, setting down the needle.

"_Edelweiss, edelweiss, every morning you greet me,"_

The sweet melody wafted out into the room and straight into Georg's heart. There had been a brief time in his life when he had shunned music, and its power to summon the past. It had been Maria, come to think of it, who had taught him to consider those memories a gift, the only gift the past was capable of offering. There was so little left of the life he'd had in between the wars, that it was lovely, actually, to lose himself in the warm and peaceful moment, at least until the silence was broken.

"Would you shut that damned thing off?" Maria, returning to the salon, barked out the order.

Max hastened to comply, while protesting, "But Maria, sweetheart, you always loved that song! Doesn't it remind you of Austria in her better days?"

"Well, I don't like it anymore," Maria snapped. "And in case you haven't noticed, Austria's better days are behind her. There is no more Austria, at least as far as I'm concerned."

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

Being daily flummoxed by Maria's transformation from sunshiny postulant to sharp-edged young woman, Georg could not let his curiosity rest. Late one afternoon, upon their return to the hotel, he lingered at the front desk, feigning interest in his mail and messages, watching as Maria's attention swung in the direction of the lobby cafe. By teatime, it was already lively, the crowd's chatter weaving in between the tinkling notes of jazz piano. There was no missing the way her eyes shone and her toes tapped.

"Perhaps you'd like to go in for a drink?" he said easily.

"But Lottie will be home soon," she said reluctantly, although her eyes didn't leave the scene.

"Another time, then. We can ask for her to be brought home an hour later. It's obvious that you want to. Nothing wrong with wanting a bit of fun."

"Perhaps someday," she said briefly. "Although I'm not sure I'm interested in drinking with you."

"What the hell does that mean?" he asked, following her into the lift. But he required no answer, having seen Maria's scowl the previous week when he'd triumphantly discovered a bottle of French brandy the Germans had overlooked.

"You drink entirely too much, Captain. I mean, I know it's not my place, but there is Lottie to consider, and-"

"All right," he said calmly.

"I am not finished yet!"

"Oh, yes you are," he said grimly, storming from the lift, and proceeding to the bar, where he gathered up the brandy and two half-empty whisky bottles. Before he could change his mind, he marched into his bedroom and emptied them all into the toilet.

"I draw the line at wine," he informed her when he returned to the salon.

"Thank heaven for that, as I grew very fond of champagne during the war," Maria offered him a tentative smile, obviously anxious to break the tension. "And – look, I've got a present for you, Captain." She reached into her pocket and tossed something his way, a gleam of silver flying through the air before the old bosun's whistle landed in his palm.

"My whistle! Where did you find it?"

"In the attic, my first day I was working out there. But I – I don't know, I wasn't sure you'd want to see it again."

"Little witch!" Georg pretended nonchalance, but later, he tucked the whistle away in his empty suitcase, so that he might take the memories with him when he left Austria for good.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

With summer just around the corner, they began to clear out the gardens, raking out the beds, weeding and pruning, tearing away at overgrown vines that threatened to choke the trees. At midday, they stopped to take lunch out on the terrace, where they could enjoy the sun and fresh air. The view – the soaring mountain peaks reflected in the lake's calm surface, the trees bursting with pink-and-white flowers, the rich blue sky dotted with fluffy clouds – filled Georg with a peaceful contentment he hadn't known in years. Even in this troubled place, he recognized that, having survived unendurable loss in middle age, he now had much to be grateful for: his children settled with a grandchild on the way, the tearing grief for Agathe dulled by time.

"Days like this are a gift from God, don't you think?" Maria asked.

"I didn't know you still believed in God," he observed, and when she began to protest, he pointed out, "you haven't once been to church, not since we met up here. No grace at meals, no bedtime prayers with Lottie. I'm a fine one to talk, I know, but with you coming from Nonnberg Abbey and all, I've always wondered how you could turn away from it. From Him, I mean," he finished awkwardly.

"Of course, I still believe in God," Maria lifted her face to the sun. "He gave me Lottie. And I pray all the time, for her, and for Clara and Susan, and for the sisters at Nonnberg. And for your family," she said pointedly. "But living at the Abbey took its toll on my health, you know. I had headaches all the time. Reverend Mother was always sending me on little errands that would take me outside, and she looked the other way when I felt that I just had to escape up to the mountains or die. That's one of the reasons she sent me to care for your family. But after I – ehrm - when I returned to Nonnberg, then Reverend Mother – well, she felt with great conviction that it God's will that I not become one of the sisters." She sighed deeply. "Those were some of the happiest days of my life."

"At Nonnberg?"

"No," she said absently, and then her spine stiffened. "Yes, of course. That's what I meant. I was very happy at the Abbey."

Georg was disarmed by the sudden outpouring from a girl who had been so reticent. He could practically see her retreat into her shell, and sure enough, after a moment, she stood up, brushed her skirts, and said briskly, "But that's enough of that from me. There's a question I've been wanting to ask you, as it happens. About the ghosts."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The first day we came here, Captain, do you remember? We talked about seeing the children, and – and other people. It happened all the time, at first, but lately, I haven't seen them at all, and I was thinking, and I was wondering if you –

Only then did Georg realize that for some time now, he had seen no ghosts at all.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**

**I'm so glad you're enjoying my story! I love the reviews, and how everyone is guessing, sometimes correctly and sometimes not, what will happen next. Some of you have better ideas than I do! This is the very last setup chapter, and when I'm back from vacation in a couple of weeks, things will really start to happen. Christopher Plummer fans may recognize some glimpses of the actor's life in the above scene where Georg goes sober. I don't own TSOM or anything about it.**


	5. Where or When

**WHERE OR WHEN**

"Georg, where's Maria? I need a favor from her."

"What is it this time, Max?" Georg sighed as he looked up from his newspaper. It was his favorite time of day, when, having put in hours of hard work at the villa, he could spread the newspaper out before him on the big table and relax with a well-deserved glass of wine at his elbow. Through the big windows, Salzburg's stone and brick buildings were washed in the buttery light of a late May afternoon, and the landscape was dotted with bursts of springtime colors, green and pinks and purples and yellows.

"What is it, Max?" Georg repeated. "It can't be a supper invitation you're after, since you've taken to dining with us every night without one."

"It's not you I need, it's Maria. Where is she?"

"She took Lottie to buy some shoes. The girl's going to be taller than her mother pretty soon, if she keeps growing like this."

"I want to borrow her. Maria, I mean."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I need to borrow Maria. Just for an evening. Tomorrow evening, as it happens."

"You need a governess for the evening?"

"No. I need a woman-" and before Georg could even raise an eyebrow, the little man rushed to explain. "For supper, and possibly a stop at a nightclub afterward. Well, actually, definitely a stop at a nightclub, and we probably won't bother with supper beforehand. With our dear Mayor, and his wife, and a couple of the Americans. Extremely _influential _Americans, I might add. Patrick something, one of them is called, and Frank is the other, and Frank's wife."

"What's Maria got to do with it?"

"The one fellow – Frank – I gather that his wife has had it with his working, day and night. She's all charged up, demanding to have a bit of fun. He told me he'd be grateful to me if I could show them around. A few cocktails, some dancing, that sort of thing. I thought I'd take them to this new nightclub that has a bit of a fast reputation. The Cave, it's called. But if the women are so outnumbered, that doesn't exactly make for a fun evening, and I thought Maria might come along and even things up."

"Surely you haven't forgotten how to line up some female companionship, Max."

"But that's just it, Georg! The situation calls for a gal with some class. Refined. Because it's business, you see."

"Absolutely out of the question. Have you forgotten where she came from, Max? The answer is no."

"_Actually_, Max, the answer is yes."

Maria's voice could have cut glass. Apparently, the lift had arrived unnoticed.

"Go wash up, Lottie darling, would you?"

Once the girl had scampered away, Maria offered Max a blinding and completely artificial smile.

"Why, I'd _love_ to go, Max. It's been ages since I've had any fun!"

"Maria," Georg began, "you can't possibly-"

When she spun to face him, the smile faded away, and her eyes burned a bright and furious blue.

"Oh, but I _can_. I can do _anything_ I choose to do, in fact. I am not a sailor under your command, Captain. Or your governess. Your generosity to me, while greatly appreciated, does not give you the right to make decisions on my behalf. Moreover, as for where I came from, it seems to have escaped your attention that I am not a postulant at Nonnberg Abbey, and haven't been one for some time."

"B-but what about Lottie?" he flustered.

"She can go to Clara for the night. The girls have been begging for a night together."

"Maria, be reasonable. You're a – a – "

"A spinster, is that what you were going to say?"

"_What_?" The thought had never even entered his head. "No! It's just that a girl like you, you have no idea what goes on in those places-"

"You have no _idea_ what kind of woman I am!"

"I know!" Max broke into the bickering. "Here's what we'll do. Georg, why don't you come along with us? That way, you can keep an eye on Maria."

"I don't need anyone keeping an eye on me," Maria snapped.

Georg thought back to the longing glances she'd sent toward the lobby's lively café. Of course. Middle aged and settled as he was, it was too easy for him to forget that she was a young woman, already some years out of the Abbey, and understandably wanting a bit of fun. This way, at least he could be there, just in case.

"That's a fine idea, Max." Georg declared.

"But, Max, if _he _comes along," she sent a scathing look in Georg's direction, "he'll throw your numbers out of kilter."

"You'll hardly know I'm there," Georg said easily. "I promise."

"She'll need a dress," Max said slyly.

"Of course." Georg wasn't sure what he was agreeing to, but it had to be better to play along. "Try these shops," he scribbled down a few addresses on a bit of paper and extended it to Maria, a white truce flag. "I had accounts at all of them, once upon a time."

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

Twenty-four hours later, Georg paced the suite, impatiently checking his watch. They'd had to cut their work day short in Aigen to return to Salzburg in time to prepare for the evening. He hadn't much practice donning evening clothes, not since before the war, but even so, he'd been ready for a quarter-hour at least, while Maria remained behind her bedroom door with Lottie, Susan and Clara, "getting ready." The ritual was familiar to him, of course, but would have thought sensible, girlish Maria immune to the need to primp and preen.

At the sound of her bedroom door opening, he turned, but then all awareness fled and the breath was knocked out of him as soundly as though he'd been punched in the gut.

Maria stood before him, golden curls tumbling over creamy shoulders, diamonds sparkling at her ears, glowing in a satin column the color of a summer sky. It was the same color – what an odd thing to remember after all these years! - as one of the dresses she'd made for herself that long-ago summer, although the resemblance ended there: that dress had been sweet, all smocking and pleats. _This _dress was designed to set the senses on fire.

"Thank you, Captain."

When she spoke, he forced his eyes back up her body to her face, those remarkable eyes and that full mouth. Her cheeks flushed with pride and excitement, but somehow what he found most appealing was the tremble in her voice.

"Thank you for the dress. It was very kind of you to arrange for this, especially after I was so rude to you. And the earrings, I hope you don't mind, but Max said-"

"Max has good taste," Georg found his voice. "You don't look very much like a governess," he admitted.

"Or a spinster," Max added.

"And you, Captain," Clara teased him with a grin, "You don't look at all like a sea captain."

"I clean up pretty well for an old man, I suppose," Georg snorted, and then it was time for all of them to crowd into the lift. There was a brief delay in the lobby when Lottie, convinced that the adults were going to a ball like the ones Maria had told her about, grew teary with disappointment. But the girl readily accepted a promise that they would have a dancing party of their own in the very near future.

Once Lottie, Susan and Clara were in a taxi going one way, and Max and Maria had joined him in a taxi headed for the Cave, Georg was able to let down his guard, and even enjoy a bit of banter with Max. But once they crossed the club's foyer and followed the host through the vast nightclub to a front-row table, he found himself on edge, even though there was nothing especially alarming about their surroundings: waiters bustled about holding trays of cocktails overhead, while a small ensemble, clustered to one side of the dance floor, tuned their instruments.

But something was just not right about Maria in this environment, and his sense of unease was confirmed when, as they arrived at their table, Maria let out a loud, ecstatic cry. Indeed, she nearly knocked over the host in her haste to launch herself into the arms of a tall, red-headed man who had sprung to his feet and folded her into his embrace.

"Maria? Is that really you? What the hell – how on earth-"

"Patrick! What a wonderful surprise!" Maria warbled.

They were speaking _English._ When had the little governess learned English?

The rest of the party stood about awkwardly while the joyous reunion continued, until Max intervened, waving down a waiter to order champagne, getting everyone seated and introduced to one another, evading Georg's pointed glare as he seated Maria between Patrick and another fellow, bushy-eyebrowed and swarthy, who must be the one called Frank. What was it with these men, anyway? Were surnames being rationed in America?

Georg winced to hear himself addressed as "George," and longed for a cocktail but settled for a glass of champagne. As though Maria, eagerly accepting her own glass before returning to conversation – in English! - with her long-lost friend, would have noticed if he'd ordered an entire case of whiskey.

Georg found himself between the Mayor on one side and Frank's wife on the other, which he quickly surmised was worse than any position he'd found himself in years of warfare at sea. The Mayor wished his advice on peacemaking among the warring factions in Salzburg and whether to replace or attempt to restore the bridges that had been damaged or destroyed during the war. On his other side, Frank's wife – what was her name, anyway? – confided to Georg she'd already enjoyed a cocktail or two earlier in the evening and was, she announced in low, breathy tones, "looking for a good time. Preferably without old Frank."

"Tell me," Georg announced to the entire party, using a voice that he knew would command their attention even over the surrounding buzz of conversation, "tell me, Patrick, how is it that you know Maria?"

"Maria?" Patrick's pale face lit up with a toothy smile, while Frank busily refilled Maria's champagne glass. "Why, I met Maria in Switzerland, where I'd been living with my family ever since the war started. I'd been widowed for only a few months, with five children to raise, when I had the good fortune to meet Maria and her little girl. She became our governess, I mean their governess, of course," he chortled. "There we were, me and my children, mired in grief, and on top of it all, marooned away from home. And Maria? Widowed just like me, her husband having given his life for his country, and she shows up out of nowhere with her darling Lottie, and everything changed. Despite her own burdens, somehow she managed to – well, she brought music back into the house, she-"

Georg could barely believe what he was hearing. He looked first to Max, wondering if this was some sort of bizarre prank, but then followed his friend's bewildered glance to Maria, whose relaxed, happy countenance had vanished.

"That's the thing about Maria," Patrick said confidingly, his admiring eyes fixed on the subject of his praise. "Everyone told me that she liked to have fun. 'Maria just wants to have a good time,' I was told, and it was true," he added with a wink, "but she was utterly devoted to my children."

Maria had closed her eyes and was biting her lip, as though performing some sort of mental calculation, but then her eyes opened, she visibly relaxed and sipped thirstily at her champagne.

There was a flurry of activity on the stage and a burst of applause as the little ensemble began to play, bright bursts of piano, soaring trumpet, thumping bass, whisking drums and, after the applause died down, the sweet sound of their lead singer floating out over the crowd.

"Tell me, Captain," the Mayor broke into his thoughts, and Georg at least appreciated the formal and old-fashioned form of address, "do you think steel would be best for the bridges, or the traditional iron? Because there are those who say-"

Meanwhile, Frank was deep in conversation with the Mayor's wife, and Max had managed to engage Patrick in a conversation about Salzburg real estate, which was, Georg reminded himself, the whole reason for this ordeal. While the Mayor started in on his other favorite subject, the feuds that had divided Salzburg society, Georg watched Maria's attention turn to the stage, where the female vocalist sat perched on a high stool, singing her heart out as though she was in an intimate conversation with each of her listeners. Maria was wholly focused on the music now. After draining her champagne glass, she leaned forward, her body swaying, as though she wanted to-

Once upon a time, he had been decisive. Even rash, impetuous. Why, he'd won a medal for behaving that way! But now, before Georg could decide whether he was too old to do so, Patrick was escorting Maria out onto the dance floor. Only now did Georg notice the expanse of skin laid bare by her low-backed dress. It was impossible to ascertain precisely where the younger man's hand had landed, and Georg's whole body went on alert. It was only natural, he told himself, that his protective instincts for this young woman, whose friendship he treasured, were now thoroughly aroused.

The Mayor paused his monologue just long enough to order another bottle of champagne, and Frau Frank – Georg still couldn't remember her name – took advantage of the break.

"So, darling George," she purred. "I understand you were widowed quite some time ago?"

"That's correct," he said briefly and as politely as he could.

"Tell me this, George." She paused, one hand lifting a champagne glass to her lips while the other settled heavily on his knee. "Don't you get _lonely_? A handsome man like you?"

The woman's husband was still deep in conversation with the Mayor's wife, their faces so close they nearly touched. If Georg still had a wife, he'd have had her out on the dance floor by now.

As though reading his thoughts, Frau Frank gave his knee a gentle squeeze.

"Don't worry about old Frank. I don't suppose you'd like to dance, would you, George?"

"No," he flinched. "War injury."

Georg turned to peer through the dim, smoky space, irrationally expecting to glimpse a fresh-faced girl in an embroidered milkmaid-style dress spinning and clapping to the Laendler. But the Maria he saw now, chattering in a lively fashion to her tall, red-headed partner, had a shimmy to her hips that she must have acquired since leaving Nonnberg Abbey. Even in the low light, the satin dress shimmered blue and green like the sea as she moved.

Although the room was not especially warm, sweat had gathered beneath his collar and trickled down his back.

"Do you suppose you would be willing to," began the Mayor.

"Wouldn't you like to," began Frau Frank.

"_No_. Now if you will excuse me?" Georg shoved back his chair and charged onto the dance floor, ignoring Frau Frank's solicitous inquiries about his supposed war injuries.

Patrick relinquished his partner with one of his wide, good-natured grins, and then Maria was in his arms. There was a moment's disconcerting dizziness as his wholesome milkmaid transformed into a graceful and accomplished partner who followed him easily across the floor, her hand, wearing its golden wedding ring, resting lightly on his shoulder.

"You apparently have a special talent for that sort of thing," Georg said acidly.

"The foxtrot?" she let out a giddy giggle that ended in a soft belch.

"Rescuing widowers with large families."

Her smile vanished.

"Yes," she said faintly, "I suppose I do, if you want to look at it that way. Look - have I done something to make you angry with me? Because I _am_ grateful to you, Captain, really I am, for the dress, and the earrings, and obviously, everything you've done for me. And for Lottie."

"Well, let's see. Tonight was the first time I learned for sure that you are a widow. You were never really clear about that with me. I learned that you spent the war in Switzerland working as a governess for an American family, and learning to speak English. And to foxtrot, apparently. Why you have been so secretive with me, and yet willing, after a few glasses of champagne, to let it all spill out in front of a bunch of strangers, I don't quite understand."

"Please. Please don't be angry with me. I can't explain it all. I mean, I _can_ explain it, but not here. Not now. Can't we just – ehrm – be good friends?"

_Friends._ He was an aging war hero and an aristocrat without a country. And very nearly a grandfather. She was a farm girl and former postulant, who had at one time enchanted him, but that was before she'd acquired a daughter and a complicated past she wouldn't discuss. Was that any basis for a friendship? He and Elsa had been friends as well, and look at how that had ended. As for Maria, she wouldn't even call him by his first name, for God's sake.

"And here I thought we got on so well together," she coaxed.

"On the dance floor, at least," he countered, and he knew he'd hit his mark when her cheeks turned pink. So she remembered that dance too, the Laendler, that last magical night before things had fallen apart and the world had gone dark.

The music grew more urgent, the insistent beat of bass and drums driving the pace. All around them, couples bounced and glided and twirled. Georg felt the burden lift from his shoulders, the accumulated weight of lost war, lost wife, lost country. When he whirled Maria about, purely for the pleasure of watching the joy spread across her face and animate her slender figure, he felt own his face split into a grin. Again and again he spun them smoothly around, the polite distance between them narrowing at each turn.

Then, without warning, the lights dimmed, the music slowed, and the singer's voice turned low and sultry. With the memory of their long-ago dance in the garden out in the open between them, it was only natural, to pull Maria closer, their arms and legs arranging themselves as though they knew just where to go. She smelled delicious, and when his hand settled on her bare back, she tensed for only a moment before relaxing into his embrace.

From the stage, the vocalist seemed to be singing only for them:

_It seems we stood and talked like this before_

_We looked at each other in the same way then_

_But I can't remember where or when_

_The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore_

_The smile you are smiling you were smiling then_

_But I can't remember where or when_

_Some things that happen for the first time_

_Seem to be happening again_

_And so it seems that we have met before_

_And laughed before and loved before_

_But who knows where or when?_

Then the lights came up and the trumpets blared, as the band swung into a fast number. While they immediately and awkwardly moved a few inches apart, Georg simply could not let go of her, not yet, even though the delight in her eyes had died; instead, she looked terrified, although he didn't understand why. It was as though he were lost in a fog and had neither instruments nor instinct to guide him.

"My turn, sweetheart."

It was the man called Frank, tugging vigorously at Maria's arm, his tie half-undone and cheeks gleaming with sweat.

"No, thank you," Maria said dazedly. "I – ehrm – I need to sit down now. I used to – but lately - well, I don't suppose I'm used to dancing."

Waggling his heavy eyebrows, Frank shoved Georg's arm aside to circle Maria's waist with his own. "Come on, darling. Just one dance," he leered.

When Frank's sweaty paw groped at her bare back, it was only another moment before Georg's fist landed on the man's chin.

His instincts had apparently not abandoned him after all.

Not ten minutes later, he had Maria in a taxi, having bought the establishment's silence by means of an obscenely large tip for the host. Max had cheerfully waved off his apologies for any ruined business prospects, and Georg had left Frau Frank's phone number, slipped confidingly into his pocket, crumpled in the gutter. The traffic was so thick that it might have been faster to walk back to the Bristol, but it had begun to rain, one of those chilly rains that reminds you that spring has not yet yielded to summer.

And his companion's mood was fragile, to say the least. While he leaned forward to give the driver their destination, she had fallen back against the seat, laughing, but it was an agitated, unnerving sort of laugh, and as soon as he settled next to her, she turned away from him, as though there was something worth observing through the window, other than pedestrians racing to get out of the rainy night. Were her shoulders shaking with silent laughter, the cool night air, or something else?

"What is it, Maria?"

"Nothing," she said sullenly, in a tone that was weighty with grievances.

"I don't like seeing you so miserable, and all that champagne probably didn't help. You were right about the drinking, you know. It seems harmless, but too much champagne-"

"Champagne?" she swiveled to face him. "Too much of _you_ is more like it. Will you ever stop treating me like a child?"

"Are you saying you'd rather I left you there to deal with Frank on your own? You have no idea. No idea of what a man like that can will try to get away with, things that a girl like you-"

"I am not a _girl_!" She swiped away an angry tear. "I am a grown woman, and-"

"Come now, Maria," he said as evenly as he could, "that fact has not escaped my notice, and we both know it. You are quite attractive, you know." Her cheeks went pink as he continued, "But if we are friends – isn't that what you said we are, Maria? – then I feel responsible for you. I may not be young anymore, but I haven't forgotten the ways of young men, and that fellow Frank was a lout, and his wife was worse. Why, she tried to – ehrm – entice me!"

"Really?" Maria's eyes went wide and her mood swung about wildly, from tearful anger to bubbly curiosity. "She did?"

"M-hm. A man my age. Can you imagine?"

"How amusing! You always talk as though you are so old, but you can't _possibly_ be – I mean," Georg could practically hear her doing the arithmetic, "if the war, I mean the first one, was -"

Fearing her calculation would be even worse than reality, he said, hastily, "Fifty-four. I'm fifty-four."

"That's all? You always talk as though you are _seventy_! I mean, not that I thought you were really sev – it's just that you make it sound like your whole life is behind you!"

"Because it is," he said soberly. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Thirty," she said glumly, knuckling away another tear. "I told you I was a spinster, didn't I?"

Raindrops spangled the windows. When the occasional flash of a streetlamp or oncoming headlight penetrated the taxi's shadowy depths, Georg caught sight of the gold ring on her hand. It was a funny thing about those rings. Owing to past events with Elsa, he no longer wore Agathe's ring, yet she nestled comfortably in his heart. Frank and his wife wore rings that apparently meant nothing. What was the story behind Maria's ring?

"I don't like seeing you so unhappy," he repeated.

"Oh, well. It's nothing, really, Captain, and especially after all this time -"

"It sneaks up on you at the strangest times, doesn't it? Georg persisted. "It's terribly difficult, I know, but l promise you, Maria, it does get easier with time. Because what happens is, the world keeps on changing, and she, or in your case, he, lives on like something preserved in amber, you see, and the distance between then and now, takes away the sharp edges, or something to that effect, I mean-" he scrambled for the words to explain.

Maria gave him a quick, sideways glance. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your husband, of course. Lottie's father. You said so little about him, that I was beginning to wonder if you'd made him up! But I'm sure you loved him very much."

"Yes, of course. Of course!" she said hastily. "I mean, it's just that he didn't – and I couldn't-"

They were crawling through a central intersection where the glare of lit-up storefronts, traffic signals, streetlamps and headlights flooded the taxi's interior. Otherwise, he'd have missed the expression that crossed her face. In only a moment, it spoke volumes. A thousand mysteries solved at a glance.

"Oh God. It's not him, is it? You were in love with another man?" Georg thought of them, first Clara and then Patrick, with their talk of Maria liking to have a good time. Had she had an affair? Or was it after she was widowed? Perhaps her husband and Lottie's father were two different men. The pieces fell together into a sickening, red-headed pattern. "It was that Patrick fellow, wasn't it?"

"_Patrick_?" Maria gave a heavy, amused, tolerant sigh, the kind one might give a small child. "Don't be ridiculous. Patrick's heart is buried in Switzerland, along with his wife. Not everyone can heal the way you did, Captain, and go on to manage a second marriage. I mean, I'm glad for you that it happened that way, really I am. Even if you are so – so - _secretive _about it."

"_Secretive_?" Coming from her, the charge was unfair, on this night especially, when so much of their pasts, shared and otherwise, had come out in the open. "_I'm_ not the one who's secretive. I've - wait. Hold on. What do you mean, second marriage?"

"You talk all the time about the children's mother, but you never say a word about the _second_ Baroness. I'm sure you're torn up about her, too. It's just too recent, is that it?"

"_Second_ Baroness?" he repeated.

"Your second wife."

"I've only been married once, Maria. Don't you think I'd remember taking a second wife?" Georg tried for a laugh, but the strangled sound vanished into a silence that filled the taxi, a silence so heavy and awkward it practically shouted.

"B-But the children," she said slowly, "they told me-"

"The children?"

Maria spoke very carefully, very deliberately, as though she were trying to remember exactly how it had happened.

"They came to see me, at Nonnberg. Twice, actually, but the second time, it was several weeks after I had left you – ehrm, them, I mean – and just a few days after the Anschluss. I had just decided to try and – no, never mind that part," she muttered, as though as in aside to herself. "They told me that you were going to be marrying Baroness Schrader. The very next day, in fact. And then, of course, it was just a few months ago, the first day you took us out there, when I saw her wedding dress, up in the attic. That's all there is to it," she finished abruptly.

He swallowed back the old feelings of guilt and remorse, which always surfaced with Elsa's memory.

"Maria, do you mean to tell me that all this time, you thought I had married Elsa Schrader?"

"Well, yes," she said, so quietly he could barely hear her over the rain drumming on the taxi's roof.

"But I _didn't_. I didn't marry her," he said helplessly. "I mean, I intended to. I bought her a great big vulgar ring. I paid for her dress, and her trousseau. I even arranged the wedding breakfast. Although when I think back on it now, all I can remember is our arguing constantly about the arrangements. Whether to marry in Vienna or Salzburg, whether the children would attend-"

Through the roar of his memory, he heard her soft exclamation of disbelief.

"Elsa - she didn't seem to understand that the Anschluss – how it had _changed _everything. She wanted things to go on as before. I asked her to consider a family holiday to Italy, just for a few weeks after the wedding, to see if things got better, as she predicted, or worse, as I did. She didn't like the idea of a wedding trip with the children, but the children and I, we have Italian passports, and I thought that if it became necessary, we could all -"

The taxi was trundling along the river now, where there was so little light that Georg could not see Maria's face as he continued, and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the rain.

"She had finally agreed to marry quietly, at the villa. But it was that same morning, the morning of the wedding, that is, when the telegram came from Berlin. I'd been requested to report to Bremerhaven, to take a command in the German Navy. To refuse them would have been fatal for all of us, and joining them would have been unthinkable, of course. So there I was, dashing madly about, making arrangements for Max to get to Shanghai, gathering cash, and our passports, and so on. I caught up with Elsa just as she was on her way upstairs to change into her dress, and I told her about the telegram, and that we'd be leaving for Italy as soon as we were married, and that – that was the end of it, just then. You see, she thought I should take the commission. There was no way to stop it, she argued. 'You can't stop it even if you try, Georg,' she said. 'You're a fool to think otherwise.' She stormed out of the house, and I never saw her again."

They were climbing up from the river now, the taxi's tires splashing noisily through deep ponds that nearly hid the street's surface from sight.

"I had no idea," Maria murmured. "You never said-"

"I'm sure I did," he protested weakly, but it occurred to him that he'd buried the guilt so deeply that he probably hadn't. "Sometimes I wonder if I should have tried harder to convince her, even it meant waiting another day or two before leaving. But I was _sick_, you see. Sick with fear and rage, and that was the only thing that gave me the strength to do it. To get all seven of them over the mountains. On what was meant to be my wedding night, and two nights after that."

Georg paused and swallowed, hard, once, twice, three times.

"I tried finding her after the war, you know. I hired a man, the best in the business. Petersen is his name. He's based here in Salzburg, and for those who can afford him, he knows how to find all the – all the lost ones."

Maria made an odd little noise, of sympathy, he supposed, and he was grateful that she could understand the vestiges of his loyalty to Elsa, who had been the first one to bring some meaning back into his life all those years ago..

"Petersen reported back to me that Elsa had last been seen in Munich, on the arm of a general, one of the fellows who was later involved in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. Which gave me some comfort, that she had gotten herself mixed up with the right sort," he said wryly. "Anyway, after that one sighting, she disappeared for good. That's what Petersen said. 'Vanished into the whirlwind,' those were his words."

The taxi door opened, admitting a gust of damp, chilly air, and it was only then Georg realized that they'd pulled up to the Bristol. He threw a bill at the driver and followed Maria through the lobby and into the lift, but even in that confined space, it was as though a wall had gone up between them. He felt hollowed out, drained of emotion, and Maria was lost in her own thoughts, her face a pale mask beneath her freckles.

When the lift opened into the suite, which sat dark and empty without Lottie's presence, they faced each other awkwardly.

"Good night, Captain," she said distantly, before sprinting to her end of the suite and disappearing into the room she shared with Lottie.

For an evening where they had learned so much about each other's pasts, they might as well have been strangers.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**

**In an A/N on my last story, I mentioned that I always like to share the inspiration for my stories. "As Thought They Knew the Way" has two inspirations, one I won't reveal right now, and the other is that I wanted to write a story that incorporates some of my favorite songs from what I think of as the TSOM years, although in some cases the years won't be quite right. "Where or When" was written in 1937 and hmmm it kind of fits with the story: ****_Some things that happen for the first time, _****_Seem to be happening again. _Anyway, e****very remaining chapter in this story will have one of my favorite songs from that era, and I hope you enjoy them.**

**Sorry this was so long, but I wanted to repay you with some action after all that setup, and I had some vacation time to write. I'm finishing up my vacation now, so updates should come more regularly. I do appreciate the reviews and PMs about M&G's mysterious pasts (at least some of G's mysteries have been solved now!), and now that things have started to happen, I hope that more of you will share your thoughts with me. I don't own TSOM or anything about it.**


	6. I Have Dreamed

**I HAVE DREAMED**

Even in middle age, Georg had not let himself go. In fact, back in March, upon his return to Salzburg, his haberdasher had complimented him for wearing the same sizes he'd worn as a young man. But formal evening wear confines even the fittest man, and tonight, as he relieved himself of tie and belt and cummerbund, of stiff shoes and gartered hose, the emotions he'd held in check all evening burst free as surely as though they'd been an overfed belly. Wounded pride, that Maria had hidden the details of her past from him. Regret for Elsa. Disgust on behalf of his fellow Salzburgers, and resentment of the entitled and piggish Americans.

But worse, far, far more shameful, was an instinct that could only be called _lust_.

In the dozen years since Agathe's death, the very idea of lying with a woman had filled him with cold dread. One humiliating weekend in Milan, a year or so after Agathe's death, was all it had taken to convince him that he would never be able to turn back the clock to his youth, when sex without love was not only possible, but preferable. He had put Elsa off of any intimacy with talk of honor and loyalty, insisting they wait for a wedding night that had never taken place.

In all of those years, the one exception had been his desire for Maria, which had flickered to life during that long ago summer, when she frolicked through his dreams nearly every night. At the time, his craving for the little governess, nobly resisted, had been held in check by the knowledge of her vocation. But tonight, it had come roaring back to life, so that there was no escaping the wanting that now thrummed through his veins. The skin on her bare back had been like silk, and her pink-cheeked innocence, knowing eyes and lush mouth intensely arousing. Now that he'd had her in his arms for the first time since their dance in the garden, and with the unspoken agreement to keep their past where it belonged breached, it was impossible to be in Maria's presence without wanting her. Wanting her urgently, desperately.

His hunger for her made him sick, or rather, he was sick with the knowledge that his hopeless yearning for her must remain unfulfilled. For once her heart had healed, Maria deserved a bright future with a man not so banged up by life.

Georg passed the night, and several more that followed, plagued by the kind of mortifying carnal dreams he associated with boyhood. The days weren't much better, especially since he could think of no way to escape their daily routine in Aigen. There, his focus and productivity dwindled as he struggled to hide his nearly perpetual arousal from her.

He was going to have to leave Salzburg, and soon. That was all there was to it. He'd gotten far too attached to Lottie, and she to him, and as for Maria-

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

For someone whose life had been turned upside-down more times than she could count, Maria was finding it surprisingly difficult to right herself after the evening at the Cave. No matter how thoroughly she immersed herself in caring for Lottie, or in the workday routine out in Aigen, no matter how pleased she was at the tidy sum she'd saved up for Petersen, her thoughts were pulled back to that night, as though by a force stronger than gravity.

Night after night, she lay awake, stewing over the Captain's recounting of the circumstances under which he'd left Austria. Baroness Schrader had chased Maria away from the villa the night of her "grand and glorious" party, and then she hadn't even married him! For eight long years, Maria had believed that at least her departure had eased any awkwardness and made it possible for him to find happiness with a new mother for the children. And it had all been for nothing!

_He had never married Baroness Schrader_.

Captain von Trapp was acting strangely, although Maria didn't understand why. No doubt it had been embarrassing for him, the failed engagement, which also explained why he seemed to avoiding her most of the time, although there were other times when she felt his eyes, a gaze heavy as a weight, follow her around the suite. He was at once preoccupied and distracted, and the shadows beneath his eyes suggested he was having as much trouble sleeping as she was.

Beginning with the first morning after their visit to the Cave, the Captain insisted that Lottie begin to accompany them out to Aigen every day rather than staying behind with Clara and Susan. Once out at the villa, he went to work clearing out the master bedroom suite on his own, refusing all offers of help and ordering Maria and Lottie outdoors to wash every inch of the gazebo's glass windows. When circumstances required her to bring Lottie into the house, for a drink or to use the toilet, he would skulk about in the shadows until their business was concluded. Gone were the days of warm reminiscences, gentle teasing and shared confidences, and even Lottie's charming presence could not bridge the gap between them.

Lottie noticed the change as well. "Why does he have to act so angry?" she asked Maria. "It makes me want to cry!" Maria began to wonder if it might not be better for everyone if she and Lottie found their own lodgings, even though it would slow things down considerably with Petersen.

Petersen: he turned out to be something she and the Captain had in common, although Maria would never be able to admit to that. Meanwhile, doubt and uncertainty clouded her mind, filling her with a sense of foreboding, that there were further turns ahead, and not for the better.

And sure enough, the next turn came a week or two later, along with the warm weather of early June. They had just arrived back at the Bristol when the Captain, paging through his mail and messages, let out a grunt of surprise.

"What is it?" she followed him into the lift.

"It's good news," he said. Although he seemed more relieved than delighted, it was the first time in two weeks she'd seen him smile. "There's a work crew, ready to show up at the villa tomorrow morning. At last! I can put this whole mess behind-" The Captain stopped when he caught sight of her face, "I mean, _we_ can put it all behind us. And move on."

When the lift deposited them in the suite, he went straight to the telephone and began making arrangements, one telephone call after the other.

"It's all set," he told Maria after he rang off. "I'll just make a brief stop out in Aigen tomorrow morning, to show them what to do, and I've booked myself a flight to New York for the day after. It appears that our business agreement is at an end, Maria," he said briskly, "although of course I am very grateful for your assistance these last months."

"You'll be back at some point, though, won't you?"

"Doubt it," he shook his head. "I might as well start to pack." Without meeting her eyes, strode off toward his bedroom.

Did he have to look so _relieved_?

"But Lottie! She'll be heartbroken!" Maria called after him, but he appeared not to have heard her.

Stomach churning, Maria went to break the news to Lottie. The girl did not take the news well, pushing past Maria and storming across the salon and into the Captain's room. By the time Maria caught up with her, tears streamed down Lottie's cheeks as she erupted into a flurry of signs.

"What is it? What's she saying?" he asked.

"She's angry at you, for leaving," Maria said, secretly feeling grateful for the opportunity to express Lottie's feelings without revealing her own. "She'll never forgive you. For one thing, you broke a promise to her."

"I did no such thing!"

"She says that you promised her a party."

"I did what?"

"The night we went to the Cave. She was jealous of us going without her, because she loves to dance, and you promised her a party of her own."

"As I recall, Maria, _you_ promised her. Can't you keep the promise on my behalf?"

After a brief exchange with Lottie, Maria reported, "she says it's not a proper party without a gentleman."

"Can't Max-?" but together, Lottie and Maria glared at him until he relented.

"Very well," he sighed, "we'll have a party tomorrow night. Right here. I'll order some refreshments. Shall we say at seven?"

OoOoOoOoOoOoOo

Early the next evening, after he'd gotten the work crews started out in Aigen, sent telegrams off to his children and taken care of some last minute arrangements, Georg returned to the hotel to find Lottie elegantly attired in a new party dress. All day, his mind had conjured the image of Maria, in her blue satin evening grown, but to his relief and disappointment, she was wearing one of her everyday polka-dotted shirtwaists, the red one. The refreshments he'd ordered with Lottie in mind were laid out on the big table.

Maria went to the phonograph and flipped through the pile of Max's latest offerings. "Opera? No. Stage musicals? No. Liturgical? _Definitely_ not. Oh! Here you go! Polkas! Perfect!"

For the next hour, they took turns energetically dancing Lottie around the salon, first the polka and then the jitterbug and even a farcical tango, the whole time with the volume turned up so high that Georg was sure all of Salzburg could hear it through the open windows. In between dances, they refreshed themselves with little pink cakes and sips of mock champagne.

During one of Maria's turns, he stood to the side, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and watched them dance. Mother and child circled wildly around the room, stopping to make exaggerated curtsies and wave imaginary fans before picking up the steps again. Maria, cheeks flushed, curls flying behind her: it was a relief, that Lottie's presence, for the moment at least, somehow left him able to enjoy the spectacle without his thoughts straying in indecent directions. Still, he couldn't help thinking of the times when Maria had been his partner, at the Cave, and before that, the long-ago Laendler.

At last, Maria, although never a fan of strictly enforced bedtimes, called things to a halt. "Come on, Lottie, love," Maria signed, laughing, "that's enough dancing for one evening. No, no more little cakes. Yes, the Captain will be here in the morning. You can say a proper goodbye to him then. But say thank you!"

"Thank you," Georg signed to her, and "good night," and having exhausted a good part of his vocabulary, he went to turn off the phonograph while Maria bundled Lottie off to bed.

He wandered over to the big window, watching the sun sink so low it lit the river on fire, and thinking back to his arrival in Salzburg nearly three months ago. He had intended this to be a quick trip, a matter of minor inconvenience, but things had turned out quite differently; circumstances had kept him away from his family and forced him into weeks of grueling and wearisome work on the villa. He'd let a young girl who needed a father grow too close to him. And the last few weeks had inflicted their own special form of torture in the form of his rekindled attraction – lust, that's what it was, he reminded himself grimly, _lust_ – for Maria.

And yet.

Now that he'd be leaving in the morning, when he'd be able to put his unseemly urges behind him for good, Georg could look back fondly on this time in Salzburg and the odd little household over which he'd presided. He'd been able to cement Agathe's comfortable place in his memory and seen Max settled. The bitter resentment he'd felt toward his home town had faded to a mild disinterest. And he'd smoothed away the rough edges of guilt about his behavior that long-ago night when the little governess had run away from him and his family. He had finally come to terms with the fact that there was very little of that young woman left, and was grateful for the friendship that had blossomed between him and the new Maria. Yes, Georg decided, the time in Salzburg had settled him, prepared him for a new chapter in his life, one that involved a very different sort of sunset, the sunset of his life.

From behind him, there was the soft sound of the bedroom door closing before Maria spoke.

"We'll say our goodbyes tomorrow, Captain, but I could say it a million times and it wouldn't be enough: thank you. From the bottom of my heart, for everything you did for me and Lottie. I will never forget your kindness. I will pray for you and your family every day, for the rest of my life."

"The pleasure was mine," Georg reassured her, turning away from the window. "It is I that should be thanking _you,_ for pitching in at the villa. You and Lottie – I've arranged with the hotel for you to stay on a while longer, if you like. Because-" he paused, searching helplessly for a way to address the matters between them that went well beyond business. "If there is ever anything you need, the two of you, I hope you will – I have become very fond of her, you know. And – ehrm – I know we had our rough spots, Maria, but I hope you also realize that I am not only grateful to you, but I respect and admire you. How you've put your life back together, even though you never really told me-" he caught himself. "I do have one regret."

"What's that?" she asked warily.

"We never made it to the café. For a glass of wine, and a dance, perhaps."

"Oh. I – well, perhaps I can ask Max to take me," she said, turning to tidy up the remnants of their little party.

Georg didn't like thinking of it, the way things here would go on here as always after he'd gone. Things had been strained between them ever since the night at the Cave, and he wished – just one more time – to see the bright smile that had lit her face when they'd spun across the dance floor, before things had gone wrong between them.

"There's no champagne, not real champagne, anyway, but if you like," he suggested, "we could – ehrm – would you like to dance now? Just one dance, I mean."

When she gave a wobbly nod of agreement, before she could change her mind, Georg hastened to turn the phonograph back on, grabbed the first album that slid into his palm and started it to play. By the time the music floated out into the vast salon, he was already halfway across the floor, reaching for her, and only then did he realize that this was no light hearted, bouncy number. The music he had chosen at random was sweetly romantic, filling the space with lush strings and soulful horns.

_I have dreamed that your arms are lovely  
I have dreamed what a joy you'll be  
_

It was almost comical, the way Maria's face mirrored his horror and uncertainty at the moment. It would be cruel and rude to step away, and yet he wasn't sure he could trust himself to go on.

_I have dreamed every word you'll whisper  
When you're close to me_

And then it was too late. Maria was in his arms, while the singer's voice wrapped around them like a caress.

_How you look in the glow of evening  
I have dreamed and enjoyed the view  
_

_In these dreams I've loved you so  
That by now I think I know  
What it's like to be loved by you  
I will love being loved by you_

In the space of a few seconds, eight years melted away, and Maria found herself dancing with her Captain as though they were back in the garden once again, as he guided her capably, his legs twined in her skirts, his gentle smile giving way to a burning blue gaze that stole the breath from her lungs and made her knees weak. When she leaned into him for support, his arm clamped around her waist and he brought his forehead so close to hers that she could feel his breath on her lips.

_Alone and awake I've looked at the stars  
The same that smile on you  
And time and again  
I've thought all the things  
That you were thinking too_

It was the moment that comes at the end of every day, when time hangs, suspended, between today and tomorrow, between the past and the future. As the light faded into violet shadow, they stopped moving, standing frozen in place while the music swelled until it filled the room. This time, Maria thought, there were no bystanders, nothing to stop him, and after tonight, there would be no more second chances. Tilting her face up toward his, she waited.

Nothing.

And so, eyes squeezed closed with the effort to be brave, she went up on her toes and brushed her mouth against his.

"Maria," came his rough whisper. "Open your eyes and look at me," and when she did, "shall we call that an accident and leave it at that?"

"No," she swallowed, her mouth dry as dust, "I did it on purpose."

She could see it on his face, the struggle not to break.

_In these dreams I've loved you so  
That by now I think I know  
What it's like to be loved by you  
I will love being loved by you_

And then his mouth was on hers, hot and hard, with a kiss that didn't hesitate before claiming her, a kiss so ferocious, so consuming that she felt it down to her toes. All she could do was loop her arms around his neck and hold on, letting him explore her mouth until he decided what would happen next.

He tore his mouth from hers and staggered backward, breathing heavily.

"I've – I've got to go," he said hoarsely.

"I know. Tomorrow."

"No. I've got to go _now. _Right now."

"Now?" she was incredulous. "Don't be ridiculous. If you don't want me-"

"It's not a matter of what I want. It's a matter of you – it's just the champagne talking, Maria, you know that-"

"Oh, for heaven's sake. That was mock champagne!" she reminded him.

He shook his head.

"Are you sure you know what you're asking for, Maria? What's going to happen if I stay here for even one more minute?"

The powerful feelings swept over her: anger, that he still could not see her as anything but a postulant from Nonnberg Abbey, but also firm resolve not to give way. Maria thought about how she had run away from him and her feelings eight years before, and how it had all been for nothing. She would never know what might have happened had she stood her ground and stayed. Anyway, since then she had done a number of brave and foolish things. What was one more?

"I do too know! I want you to – I mean, I ask you to-"

"We will never be able to put things back the way they were before," he warned.

"What does it matter? You'll be gone at first light tomorrow."

Hope as fragile as a bubble, Maria held her breath and watched him considering.

He drew near once again, lifting his hand to brush the hair back from her face, letting his fingertip trace her profile, dip lower to graze her neckline. His face came close to hers, his breath testing her resolve one more time, and then he was kissing her again, holding her body tight to his, his fingers digging into her hips. Even through the layers of her clothing, his touch was like a brand.

This was it, Maria thought to herself. She couldn't quite believe it was happening to her, that this was _him,_ and she told herself to be sure and absorb every bit of it, every bit of him, while she could. Once upon a time, when she'd had innocent dreams of such an encounter, she'd had to rely on her imagination to fill in most of the details; now she had the chance to know the touch and the taste of him. She raised her hands hesitantly from his shoulders and ghosted them over his hair, which felt surprisingly soft. It took her a moment to make the connection between her touch and his soft growl in response.

The music came to an end, and in the empty silence, he pulled away from her, took her hand, and towed her into his bedroom while she stumbled along behind him.

The room was painfully tidy. Nearly everything had been packed with military precision into two large suitcases, ready for his departure in the morning. For a warm June evening, the room seemed awfully cold. Maria wrapped her arms around herself and watched him lock the door carefully before shedding his jacket, tie, shoes and socks.

"Should-" her insides were a mass of frantic fluttering butterflies, and she had to take a deep breath to steady her voice, "should I get undressed?"

He gave her a curious look that relaxed into a grin. "I'll take care of that myself, if you don't mind." Despite his smile, his voice was so dark it made her shiver.

Anticipation mixed with dread as Maria waited for him to remove the rest of his clothing. But instead he padded over to her, barefoot, and began to undress her, carefully unbuttoning her shirtwaist and placing it neatly on a chair. He went about things in a businesslike manner that she found oddly calming; if he'd used that dark voice on her again, or touched her in any other way, she was fairly sure she'd die of embarrassment, if she didn't go up in flames first.

"Maria. Are you nervous?" and whatever expression flashed across her face caused him to add a soothing, "It's perfectly understandable. I know it's probably been a long time. To tell you the truth, I am a little nervous as well."

"You? But I thought you'd been with lots of – Frau Schmidt, she used to say that-"

He pushed her skirt off her hips, gently urged her from her shoes, and went to work on her chemise.

"Before I was married, yes, I had quite a reputation. But that was a different time. I was a different man. Now, well, I haven't been with a woman in years."

"Do you mean to tell me you haven't-?"

His lips quirked a smile.

"Once. A year or so after she died. I didn't much like it, not with someone I didn't really-" he broke off.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." His gaze, warm with admiration, was like velvet against her bare skin. _Bare _skin, because somehow, he had got her chemise off and was openly admiring her. "Nothing at all. You are _perfect,_ Maria."

"But what about Baroness Schrader?"

"I beg your – no, we never – look, Maria," he grimaced, "This is hardly what we - let's talk about something else. Like why you aren't wearing any stockings."

"Because it's June, and it's hot. And stockings got so expensive during the war. Why?"

"Because," his voice was thick. "They're a lot of fun, to take off."

Another moment, and her knickers were puddled on the floor. Without waiting for permission, Maria raced toward the bed and dove under the covers.

Georg watched her scamper for cover, amused despite his own bout of nerves. At one time, he'd been known on three continents for his bravery, yet he'd been unmanned by this wisp of a girl, by her blue eyes, her scent, her spirit. By _her_.

The rest of his clothing discarded, he slid into bed and wrapped her in his arms, trying to stop her from trembling. Beneath her freckles, she was so pale that he thought she might be sick.

"Have you changed your mind?"

She shook her head wordlessly.

"Then we'll manage," Georg assured her, forcing a confidence into his words that he did not feel, "but we'll just go about it very slowly. All right?"

Still mute, she nodded.

"Let me see if I can make it easier for you," he offered, although he had no idea how to do so.

"I think," her pale cheeks stained with roses, but at least she was able to speak, if only in a whisper, "it would help if I could see you."

He obediently rolled onto his back and shoved the sheets down to his knees, begging the rest of his body not to betray his feelings, a task that became futile when she began to run her fingers hesitantly over his skin. She kept the sheet wrapped firmly under her arms, while she let her fingertips trace the edges of the places where the sun hadn't reached, biting her lip with concentration.

Georg took advantage of the interlude to breathe deeply and attempt to regain control. From the moment he had sealed his mouth to hers, he had felt something stir to life within, something that truly terrified him. Nothing, not their long-ago flirtation, not their weeks of camaraderie, not even his recently awakened lust, nothing could have prepared him for the ferocious desire that had roared to life when she'd given him that first gentle kiss. He found himself at the edge of impulses so intense, so desperate, that he wasn't sure he could control them. It had been years, if ever, since he'd felt this way.

Was it the way she had kissed him back, with a sort of startled and untamed passion? For all the times she berated him that she was no longer Fraulein Maria, the little governess, she seemed oddly timid now, for a woman who'd been with, by his figuring, at least two men. Or maybe more, if you listened to Clara and Patrick. No matter. He would take his time with her, until she was ready to be as wild as he somehow knew she could be, until she held nothing back from him.

When he reached out to stroke her bright, rumpled hair, she met his gaze, her eyes holding both fear and desire, took hold of his hand and cupped it to her face. That was his signal: gently, tentatively, he took her in his arms again.

He began to feed her brief kisses, still trying to take his time with her, but he could not control his hands for very long, could not keep them from smoothing her shoulders and following the curve of her spine. His very skin felt raw with need. When he pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her neck, he felt her pulse pounding against his lips like a tiny bird he was holding caged, a sign that her fear had been replaced by passion.

"Ready?" he whispered, but he could barely wait for her incoherent agreement before his mouth and hands were everywhere, gliding and tugging and tasting, and then he was on top of her, the passion mounting, rising higher and higher. His ears filled with the roar of his blood, so loud he barely heard the sharp, strangled cry.

A trifling doubt entered his fevered mind, a doubt that began as a trickle but swiftly flooded his veins with comprehension like ice water. In the next moment he had scrambled away from her and sprung to his feet.

"What the hell?" Georg gasped, straining to pull air into his lungs. "What the _hell_?"

"What is it?" She struggled to sit up, her face once again ashen.

"What is it? What _is _it? You know perfectly well what I - what it _is_, Maria, is that – but how can it be?" He ran his fingers through his hair. The evidence was there, beneath and all around her.

"Do you mean to tell me that you're a _virgin_?"

"Was," she cleared her throat and repeated, "I _was _a virgin. It would seem that I'm not one anymore."

"But I thought you were married!"

"Come now, Captain. You yourself said – you didn't really believe that, did you?" she said dully.

"Yes. I mean no! I mean – I suppose I had my doubts, yes. You never really – but there was all that talk about your wild behavior! And - and there was Lottie! I thought perhaps there was no husband at all, or that there was another man, and she might have been born of out wedlock, but this -"

"Lottie is not mine."

"What do you mean, she's not yours?"

Head bowed, Maria began to twist her fingers together in her lap.

"I mean that I am not her mother, and she is not my daughter."

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**

**I hope you're enjoying my story, and that you'll leave me a review. **

**...and so now we know at least part of Maria's backstory. When I started writing this story, I hoped this would be a shocking plot twist, but I can see that a lot of my readers and reviewers had their suspicions all along. But then again, I did drop hints along the way. I'm glad I'm not trying to make a living as a mystery writer!**

**I said in an earlier A/N that this story is partly inspired by some of my favorite songs. "I Have Dreamed," from Rodgers & Hammerstein's "The King and I," wasn't actually written until 1951, but I love how it speaks to M&G's situation: two people who **_**know**_** how wonderful things will be between them, because they have each dreamed of the other for so long. Besides, the songs, this chapter reveals the **_**other**_** inspiration for this story: I once wrote a story called "Nothing Like a Yesterday," in which Georg learns, just before the wedding, that Maria is not a virgin, and that made me want to construct a scenario in which the opposite happens, in which he thinks she isn't, but she is, and boy was this a lot of setup to create that situation!**

**In case you're interested, Georg's interlude in Milan has featured in many of my stories! **

**Don't own, all for love.**


	7. Deceptions

**DECEPTIONS**

"If Lottie is not your daughter, Maria, then where, _may _I ask, did you get her?"

"I stole her. Five years ago. From Nonnberg Abbey."

A wave of nausea gripped his gut.

"Oh, God. Don't tell me you're a nun after all."

"No. No, of course not." Maria didn't take her eyes from her lap, where her fingers nervously twisted and twined. "I never took my vows. Surely you don't think I would have-"

Georg was going to go mad, stark raving mad. He was sure of it. He reached for his shirt where he'd dropped it on the floor in his haste to undress – it could not have been more than a half hour ago, but it seemed a lifetime! - and tossed it in her direction. "Put this on," he ordered, before shoving his legs into his trousers and stalking out to the salon to pour himself a drink, only to recall that he'd discarded all the liquor. What had he been thinking? When he returned to the bedroom, he retrieved the chair where he'd so carefully laid her clothes, threw them on the floor, and repositioned the chair near, but not too near, the bedside. When he went to check that the door was locked, she spoke to his back.

"I don't know why you're so angry at me. You knew all along I wasn't married, or at least you suspected it. Anyway, I don't see why it matters, why you wouldn't have gone with me if you'd known. It was what _I_ wanted. And you know perfectly well that you wanted me, too."

He turned to face her, finger jabbing at the air.

"We were supposed to be friends to one another, and you lied to me! I never would have-"

"I'm sorry I had to lie to you. You're right. I've been dishonest, to – ehrm – and utterly unfair to you. But I had good reasons for it! You have to believe me about that."

"I'm angry at myself, that's certain. Whether I'm angry with you depends on those good reasons to which you refer. And so, Maria," he seated himself at the bedside, "you are going to tell me everything. Everything. You aren't leaving this room until you're finished, and if I find out later that you kept anything from me, I swear, I'll kill you."

Georg regretted the threat, of course, as soon as her eyes went wide with fear, but pride kept him from apologizing for it. Who knew what other tricks she'd pulled on him, after he'd opened his home to her, not to mention his wallet.

Maria, nearly lost in his white shirt, was huddled in the middle of the big bed, surrounded by the evidence of their interrupted encounter. Out of nowhere, a memory sprang to his mind: her first night at his dinner table, eight years ago, when she fumbled with the place settings until Gretl came to her assistance. Now, eight years later, he could almost see the shell that had encased the new Maria crack open to reveal the original little governess: brave and foolish, lively and determined, but with a certain lack of confidence, a shy reticence. Even as she kept her eyes focused on those nervous fingers in her lap, the words began to spill out of her, as though she'd been holding herself together for weeks and months, and once the walls crumbled, the truth came rushing out of her nearly faster than he could absorb it.

When she'd run away from his family eight years ago and returned to Nonnberg, it had apparently been decided very quickly that Maria would never take her vows. "They said it wasn't the life I was meant to live, and I mean, I guess I had known that all along. The headaches and all," she said vaguely.

Already, Georg felt that she was holding something back from him, but conscious of the part he had played in her departure that long-ago night, he decided to hold his tongue.

Instead, they'd put her to work in the Abbey's orphanage. Not much of an orphanage, apparently, just a rickety house in the shadows of the Abbey's walls, half-empty, but home to a handful of children. "All boys. Mischievous little monkeys," she managed a wistful little smile. "I guess it was easier to find homes for the girls."

In the second year of the Anschluss, though, things changed. The Nazis began to send children to the orphanage, two or three at a time, until the little house fairly overflowed with them. These children were uniformly beautiful, fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed. "Even their teeth were perfect," Maria told him.

Lottie had been one of those children.

"The thing of it is, she was an exception, being so young. We didn't think she was even two years old, not even old enough to tell us her name, so that we had to choose one for her. Most of the children were older, six or eight, or even as much as twelve in some cases. Old enough," for the first time, she raised her head to look at him, her blue eyes liquid with sorrow, "old enough that even if they couldn't speak German, they could make it clear that they'd been taken away from their parents in Poland. You cannot imagine what it was like, a houseful of children who had been torn from their families. Sometimes I was actually glad, you know, that I'd never known my father, and that my mother died when I was so young, because if I'd been raised in a normal sort of home, I think I'd have gone mad, living in the middle of all that grief."

Georg had heard accounts of how the Nazis had stolen the most Aryan looking children away from Poland, so that they could be raised in Germany, but he was focused now on Maria, and getting to the bottom of her story.

"About Lottie, please."

"Right. When she came to us, she was such a delicate-looking little thing, still in nappies, so pale, still quite bald other than a few wispy golden curls, but she was toddling all over the place, and babbling away, just nonsense syllables, I think, although I don't speak Polish, but you could tell she had so much she wanted to say-"

"Hold on. She was talking?"

"Oh, yes, and she definitely could hear, just like any little one," Maria said somberly. "But within a few months, one of the children got sick, and then another, and then – it was measles. I'd had it as a girl, but the children," she faltered, "the children-" she stopped and pressed her palms to her forehead as though she could rub away the awful memories.

Georg felt for her, but he was determined not to let her slither away from the truth again. "How many of them were lost?" he said quietly.

"Probably half of them. A dozen children at least," she sighed. "It was a terrible time. Lottie survived, but the damage was done. By the time she'd recovered, she'd stopped making any sounds at all. I'd already grown quite attached to her, but after that, it seemed like I was the only one who understood her, the only one she'd respond to, and so when they came-"

"Who came?"

"The Nazis. They were angry, all the expense of transporting these children to Austria, only to lose a bunch of them. As though the children were a _crop _or something. The Nazis arrived one morning and told us they were closing the orphanage and taking the remaining children away. Sister Berthe reminded them that we still had care of the children who had been there all along, and the one man – I'll never forget this, he said to her, all calm and businesslike and everything – 'don't worry, Sister. We'll dispose of the ones we don't want.'"

"Dear God," Georg murmured, and his stomach lurched with revulsion at the thought of the horrors that she'd faced, Maria and those helpless children.

"Exactly. There were only two boys left from the original group who had survived. A little Jewish boy, Mikel, and there was a Rom boy, Nico. And then of course, we knew that they wouldn't want Lottie either. Mostly because she was deaf, although by then, she'd also sprouted those freckles, and her hair had gotten so much redder, and she didn't look at all like what they had intended - Well, so then-"

Maria cleared her throat. She was approaching a turning point in her story, that much was clear from the way she had stopped twisting her hands together. Now she sat up straight, her spine as long and elegant as a queen's, and her blue gaze, strong and clear, was focused on some point in the indefinite distance. "So, we decided – Sister Berthe and me, that is – we decided that I would take the three children to Switzerland."

"I beg your pardon?" he startled.

"To Switzerland. Over the mountains."

"You took three children over the mountains?"

"_You _did it," she said defensively.

"I'm a man. And I had three sturdy teenagers to help with the younger ones. What if you had gotten lost up there?"

"Those are my mountains, too. I could never have gotten lost up there. Still, it was very difficult. The hardest thing I've ever done. It took four nights, four cold and terrifying nights. But we made it!" It was impossible to miss the note of triumph in Maria's voice. "Sister Berthe gave me a little bit of cash, and she'd found me a spare habit. The plan was for me to pose as one of the sisters, to find a Catholic orphanage that would take them, and the plan would have worked, too, except that once I-"

"Hold on," Georg interrupted her. "Where was this?"

"Zurich. I had telephoned around and found an orphanage that would take them, but you see, once I-"

"Oh, my God. That was _you?_"

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw you, Maria. In Zurich. A nun towing three children behind her. I thought you were a ghost!" They'd talked about the ghosts so many times before that she didn't look surprised, just gave a matter-of-fact nod.

"I wish I had seen you, Captain."

There was an awkward moment between the two of them, and the shared acknowledgement that their brief intimacy made her continued use of his title absurd, but then Maria went on, with a calculating gleam in her eye, "You would have been a great help to me, no doubt. Just as you were here in Salzburg."

But Georg sensed her game, saw what she was up to: her ingratiating words were a prelude to her slipping off the bed and out of his room, without having explained everything to him.

"Don't you dare move," he commanded. "Keep going."

"Well, I - I couldn't do it. I just couldn't!" Maria's voice quivered with emotion. "I _couldn't_ leave Lottie. So I took the money I had left and bought myself some proper clothing, and an inexpensive wedding ring. When I called at the orphanage, I told them I was a widow from Salzburg, left with my own little girl to raise, and that I'd been a clerk at the orphanage who had promised to get the boys out of Austria and find them a home. Once the boys were safe, well, then,"

"Then?"

"I began my new life. I was very lucky to find work with Patrick's family almost immediately. I told them – I told everyone – that I was a widow, that my husband was," her cheeks turned faintly pink, "a murdered hero with the Austrian resistance and – well, you know how it was during the war, in Switzerland at least. Everyone was from somewhere else, everyone had a story, no one asked too many questions. So that was that. I was very happy in Switzerland, you know."

"So I gather," Georg said dryly, "At least from what I was given to understand, you had quite the social life. Whatever doubts I had about your marriage, it never occurred to me that you were still a - so innocent, I mean."

"I think," Maria said slowly, "that it was part of my disguise, acting a bit wild. Like I was hiding away the girl I had been here in Salzburg, and trying to understand who I was meant to become if I was not going to become one of the sisters. It must sound frivolous to you, dancing and drinking my way through the war, but it was harmless enough. And I knew Patrick was watching out for me the whole time."

Ever since the evening at the Cave, that pinprick of jealousy had never really healed. "So that fellow – Patrick – he knew the truth?"

"Oh, no! He doesn't know. No one knows, not Clara, not anyone. I mean, Lottie knows, more or less, but no one else. Except you, now."

"Lottie? But she can't possibly remember what came before."

"Oh, I doubt Lottie remembers much about Poland. But she deserves to know about her parents. Long before she could have understood, I made a point of telling her that God had given her to me to tend for a while, that her Mama and Papa loved her very much, that I didn't know where they were, that they might even be in heaven, but that after the war I would do everything I could to find out. It's not like I had to worry that she would tell anyone. At least that's how I thought about it at first. Lottie and I – we always managed to communicate without language, if that makes any sense. She was so little, and her needs so basic. We had a sort of sign language that sufficed, more or less, and I was her only connection to the world around her. But then I met Clara, and everything started to change."

"How so?"

"It wasn't until I met Clara that I understood that it might be possible for Lottie to have words. How well she might be able to communicate with other people, and how to teach her to read, and – oh, so many things! When Clara offered to help me with Lottie, I knew it was a risk, to keep reminding Lottie of the truth when she might be able tell others. But it would have been wrong to keep the truth from her, and it would have been just as wrong to keep her imprisoned in silence when learning signs and lip-reading would free her. You see that, don't you?"

"Yes, yes. I suppose," Georg said, still trying to make sense of what he was hearing. "But do you mean to tell me that the child has kept this secret for all these years?"

Maria shook her head. "I'm not really sure what she understands. She's still awfully young, and I'm the only sort of mother she's ever known. But you can see she yearns for a father. Just look at the way she latched onto you! For the longest time, she insisted that Patrick was her father. And before that," she managed a faint smile, "it was the postman. It could be anyone, really."

It was ridiculous, for a man of his age and situation, but her words stung, just a bit. Looking for a way to change the subject, he observed, "but surely your secret was safer in Switzerland than here in Salzburg, Maria. What was it that made you come back?"

Her eyes met his, and she hesitated.

"Petersen."

"Petersen? _The _Petersen? The one who knows how to find – what would _you _know of Petersen?"

"Well, _you _were in Switzerland, and _you_ found out about him, didn't you?" Maria retorted. "Everyone knows about Petersen."

"Yes, yes, I understand, if you're looking for someone lost in the war, there's no one better. It's just that that kind of search costs a fortune."

"I'm well aware of that. But he's my best chance to find out about Lottie's parents. At first, when I learned he was based right in here Salzburg, I was nervous about coming back. But there is no one left at Nonnberg to give away my secret," she sighed sadly, "not Reverend Mother, or Sister Berthe, or Sister Margarethe. The price he quoted me was like a punch in the gut, but I _promised_ Lottie, and surely keeping that promise is as worthwhile an expenditure as finding Baroness Schrader," her hand flew to her mouth. "I mean – I'm sorry, Captain. I'm far too outspoken, you know that."

He ignored the baffling comment about Elsa. "Never mind that. Tell me the rest of it."

"There isn't much more. I've saved up nearly every shilling you've paid me. That's another way you helped me, even if you didn't know it. Another month or two, and - Petersen thinks there might be some kind of records at the Abbey, and he promised to start looking as soon as I scraped the money together. He promises the strictest confidentiality, too, which is important, because-"

"Maria," he interrupted, "Are you sure that even Petersen can find a couple from somewhere-or-another in Poland who lost their nameless daughter five years ago?"

"He's going to try," she said stubbornly. "He's got to try, for Lottie! I was just about her age when I lost my mother, you know." She crossed her arms around her chest and regarded him directly, as though she had nothing left to hide. Or did she?

"So now you know everything," she said, as though reading his mind.

"Except for one thing, Maria. Why didn't you just tell me the truth from the start? Surely you know I would have helped you just the same. We could have involved the authorities."

"Oh, no!" Her face flushed with alarm. "Oh, _no,_ Captain! No one can know that I am not Lottie's mother!"

"Why ever not? The war left thousands of children left orphaned. Lottie's one of the lucky ones, to have you."

"I read in the paper that these children, the ones taken from Poland, they've become a bit of a cause. Returning them to Poland is the only thing that all the sides seem to be able to agree on, though they recognize that some of the children are happily settled with their new families. But I _stole _Lottie. I never properly adopted her, and I can't adopt her, because I'm a spinster. Without a husband, no one will believe I can give Lottie a proper home. If I can't find Lottie's parents, they'll never let me keep her, not with all those countries lined up in favor of sending her back. Which I know is the right thing to do, if Petersen can find her parents, but if not, I've got to stick to the story that she's my daughter. Otherwise they'll – please, Captain, _please_. Please promise me that you won't tell anyone! I know you're angry at me, for lying to you and taking your money, and I don't blame you, but please, I beg you-"

She scrambled to her knees, lunging toward him, her beseeching expression giving way to a wince of pain.

Shame settled on his chest like a weight, shame and disgust, at his own wretched self.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," he said stiffly. "Had I known, I'd have taken more care."

"It doesn't matter," she wiped her arm across her face before looking around the ruined bed. "I'm sorry I made such a mess of things."

"_I_ made a mess of things," he grimaced. "I'll run a warm bath for you. You'll need looking after."

"I don't need looking after," she said, but the fiery independence had leaked out of her.

"For once in your life, Maria, will you just do as you're told?"

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

It was another hour before he was back in his bed – alone – but it was shortly after dawn when Georg finally gave up on the possibility of sleep. Instead, he finished packing, bathed, shaved and dressed. When he carried his bags out into the salon, Maria was sitting at the big table, hair tumbling down around her green dotted shirtwaist, staring sightlessly out the window while a cup of tea sat untouched before her. Although it was past sunrise, the clouds sat like a lid overhead, barely letting the sun brighten the city below.

"Maria."

"Captain," she rose to her feet, "I – first off, once again, I apologize, for having withheld the truth from you. And I want you to know that I will repay you for everything. I mean, it will take a long time. A very long time. But-"

He silenced her with a glare.

"You have managed to remember that I am leaving this morning?"

"Of course. I only want to-"

"Be quiet," he ordered her, feeling very near his limit. How had his life spun so badly out of control? He laced his fingers behind his back and began pacing the edges of the big carpet that lay in the center of the salon. "I am going to speak, now, and you are not to interrupt me. First, I want you to know that I will not betray you and Lottie. Even though you betrayed me, by not trusting me."

"But I-"

"I said, be _quiet!_ You will not repay me, Maria. I have more money than I know what to do with. You are welcome to stay on here for a while, so that you do not need to worry about finding a proper home for Lottie. If you run into any difficulties, you are to contact my solicitor, whose name and number you will find by the telephone. In return, though, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want a truthful answer. You are capable of that, aren't you?" he said evenly, never pausing his steady pacing even when he saw her wince.

"Captain, I-"

"About last night, Maria. You didn't – I mean, you weren't hoping for – you didn't come to my bed hoping that there could be something more permanent between us, did you?"

Bright flags of color appeared in her cheeks.

"Why would I do that? And you know, Captain, it's not like anyone made you kiss me back."

"I will take responsibility for my part in it, yes. We both know there was unfinished business between us from that summer. Last night," Georg stopped his pacing and gentled his voice, "you did me a very great honor, Maria. I will never forget you, you and Lottie. But surely you understand how things are for me now. There is no possibility of anything more, I can't offer you anything, except possibly-"

"No, no," she took a step backward and shook her head violently. "_No. _I don't want anything from you."

"Listen to me. You can keep the money. I will pay Petersen to look for her parents."

"I don't want your money, Captain," she snapped, but he ignored her, and plowed on.

"And if it becomes necessary, if Petersen fails to locate Lottie's parents, I will marry you, so that you will be able to keep her. But it would be a marriage in name only. I would support you financially, of course, but I would not ever return to Salzburg to live, and we would have no relationship. None at all."

"No!" It was impossible to miss the horror on her face. "No. I could _never._ I don't want to marry anyone!"

"Don't be a fool," he struggled to stay calm. "You can't raise a child without a father."

Now she was on her feet, spine straight, chin up, eyes flashing.

"Oh, yes I can, Captain!" She dragged her fingers through her wild curls and glared at him again. "You know, I wish we'd never run into you that day. We'd have been fine without you, just fine. Lottie doesn't need a father. I didn't have a father, after all."

"So," he bit out, "now you are making a lie out of your efforts to make me into a better father?"

She gave a long, exasperated sigh.

"_Your_ children had no mother. Lottie has me. We don't need anyone else. And anyway, you're not proposing to be her father, not really. You're proposing to be her – ehrm – our _banker_! And if I were going to marry anyone, it certainly wouldn't be you!"

It was a low blow, but he deserved it. Georg summoned his dignity and replied, "And that's as it should be. You need a young man, someone your own age. And you need to start a family of your own. You can't spend the rest of your life borrowing other people's families."

Her head snapped up and he held his breath, waiting for her to take offense and berate him, but the fight had gone out of her: she only slumped back into her chair and began to play with her teacup.

"Take it from me, Maria, you don't want to go through life alone."

"Take it from you?" She seemed more curious than angry. "But that's exactly what you've done, going through life alone."

"That's just it. I speak from experience. Look, Maria, you said once that we were friends. So take some advice from your wise old friend, or at least consider it."

She gave a quiet nod, if not of agreement, then of acceptance.

"I'm sorry about lying to you, Captain. And about last night - I might have been innocent, but I'm not a child. I knew what I wanted. Like you said, we had unfinished business and I – ehrm - I merely wanted to finish it."

"All right, then," Georg said, "then there's just this one more thing. Maria, if Petersen finds Lottie's parents, and you send her back to them, you will please try to remember – I mean, you ought to know that – look. When you first came to us, all those years ago, I wasn't much of a father. But it was because of you – and then the war – well, it seems that I _have_ managed to raise seven children after all, and so I speak with some authority when I say that,"

The merest glimmer of a smile crossed her face.

"What _are_ you trying to say?"

"What you did for Lottie. Trying to do what's best for her, to open the world up for her, even at the risk of losing her. That's," he fumbled, "that's exactly the sort of thing a mother would do, a mother or a father, and if they take her from you, I hope you will remember that. It doesn't matter what any bunch of diplomats say. _You _are that child's mother, now and forever. It's a very great thing you have done, very courageous. I think all the more highly of you for it."

Her eyes filled with tears, and she took a deep breath as if to tell him something else, when there was the sound of a door opening and Lottie tumbled into the salon, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, her fingers fumbling with a question.

"She wants to know when you're leaving," Maria said quietly.

Georg glanced at his watch.

"Actually, I ought to be leaving just about now," he lied. His flight was not for another three hours, but he realized just how much he'd been dreading this farewell, and he didn't have any fight left in him when it came to Maria. He watched Maria explain the situation to Lottie, whose face crumbled. His fingers remembered not a single sign he'd learned, so he only beckoned the little girl into his arms and dropped a half-dozen kisses on her red curls while she soaked his shirt front with tears. Then he turned to face Maria.

"Goodbye, Maria."

Her face was impassive, her voice dull.

"Goodbye, Captain. Thank you for everything."

And then there was nothing left for Georg to do but take his bags in hand and march toward the lift, trailed by clouds of shame and regret. When the lift doors slid open and he turned to face the pair of them, Maria and Lottie, their bright heads were silhouetted against the gray morning light, but he could not see their faces.

Then the doors slid closed.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

The murky and oppressive June morning stood in sad contrast to the March day when he'd arrived in Salzburg, an early spring day sharp and clear and full of promise. While he'd arrived fearing the ghosts of the past, and with no particular hopes and expectations for the future, he was leaving three months later with even fewer, as dull and empty as he'd been in years. Even the ghosts had abandoned him.

The plane surged forward, the momentum pressing him into his seat. As they climbed through the clouds that had blanketed the city, Georg quickly lost sight of Salzburg for good.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**

**Obv this is not the end. Pay attention to the title of this chapter and keep reading!**

**Thank you for the reviews, I am so sorry not to write back to each of them, but it's either that or ... finish the story. Also I can see notices of the reviews, but they seem to be held up by the website every day or two, which makes it hard for me to reply in any case. **

**There was supposed to be a song in this chapter, but it belongs to Maria's POV and the chapter got too long, so I think the next chapter might have two songs. Not sure, not sure, Gretl (to quote Georg).**

**The Nazis really did steal Polish children to be raised in Germany, to expand the "Aryan" stock. And there was quite a bit of postwar fuss about returning them to Poland, although of course I've messed with the details.**

**Like I say, I LOVE the reviews, which inspired me to work harder to convey G's state of mind: he feels old, and worn out, and as though his life is behind him. Keep in mind that he is not (yet) lovesick puppy! Also, for those who called out Georg for having searched for Elsa, but not Maria, during the war – that was useful feedback. Way back in chapter 1, upon Georg's arrival in Salzburg, one of his very first thoughts was about Maria, whom he assumed was tucked away in Nonnberg Abbey, since he hadn't heard of her since she ran away from his family. But I took that feedback and used it a bit in this chapter, and it will come back even more in the next one, so I do thank you for the idea!**

**And yes, by sending Maria and the three children over the mountains to Zurich, I am compounding the sin of geographic inaccuracies first committed by Rogers and Hammerstein when they had the von Trapps flee over the mountain. Because, you know, I don't own anything about TSOM.  
**


	8. Bewildered

**BEWILDERED **

After a day or two, Maria was no longer sore in unfamiliar places, but the mortifying memories refused to fade: how he had bathed her as though she were a child, and buttoned her into one of his nightshirts, before escorting her back to the room she shared with Lottie. The whole time, his expression had been so grim, lips pressed into a firm line, that it was obvious that he regretted the whole matter. If Captain von Trapp had ever wanted her, he didn't want her anymore.

The first night after he left for New York, she'd waited until Lottie was asleep before crossing the salon and crawling into his bed, where the linens still bore evidence of their encounter. Maria buried her head in the pillow, inhaling his scent, and let herself recall every moment they'd been together, every strange and terrifying and beautiful moment. The following night, when she returned to his room to discover that the hotel chambermaids had changed the sheets, she wept.

Not that it really mattered, because she had committed _everything_ to memory: the different colors and textures of his skin, the hollow at the base of his throat, his broad shoulders and wiry legs, the scrape of his unshaven chin against her face, his wicked mouth and clever fingers, and, most especially, his low cries and muffled gasps of delight. The whole thing hadn't lasted a half hour, but it had been more than enough time to allow Maria a glimpse of a side of her Captain she had never known, a taste of what lovemaking between men and women had to offer, and just enough passion to tantalize without satisfying her. The warm summer nights were disturbed by restless dreams from which she awakened gasping for breath, heart pounding, legs tangled in the sheets, her body throbbing with a heavy ache she had no name for.

It was true what people said about her: Maria had flirted her way across Switzerland during the war, had danced with and even kissed her share of men, all in an effort to push one man in particular to the dark corners of her memory. But now the Captain had _branded _her, she realized with a stab of remembered pleasure, and she would never be the same.

Even so, she never regretted having lain with him, not even for a minute. If Maria felt guilty about anything, it was that in the end, she still had not been completely honest with him. She had told the truth about Lottie, but she had hidden from him an equally important truth, one he must never know:

That she had always loved him, and that she always would.

And if she begrudged her Captain anything, it was not that he had taken her innocence, but that he had taken the Laendler from her. For eight long years, she'd clung to the memory of their sweet, romantic dance in the garden, but now, although her worldly experience will still quite limited, she knew what that dance had been meant to symbolize, how it was different from the miles of foxtrotting she'd clocked during the war. Maria now understood the desire that had burned in his eyes that night eight years ago, just in time for that desire to be extinguished forever.

During their last, miserable conversation, the morning when he'd left Salzburg for good, he had offered to marry her. The very notion was so far-fetched she had never before even thought to dream of it! While she couldn't possibly have considered such an absurd offer, Maria often wished she'd allowed herself a moment or two just to bask in it, to let herself pretend she was dizzy with joy rather than heartache, that in another set of circumstances, she might have accepted him. But she'd known, without a moment's deliberation, that she'd have to refuse him. Because the only thing worse than a future without someone you loved, was a future of waking up every day next to someone who could never love you back.

If the nights were for mourning the loss of love and passion, the days were fraught with more practical problems. Maria worried _constantly_ about money. Although they stayed on at the hotel, where their expenses were minimal, the Captain's departure had also taken away her only source of income. She had brought Lottie to Salzburg hoping for Petersen's help, but when she'd written the man to say there would be a brief delay in her plans, he'd sent back a curt reply that he would be moving her to the end of his waiting list, and that his fees would undoubtedly increase by the time she was near the top again. But she wasn't sure how long the Captain's vague invitation to stay on at the hotel "for a while" would last, and how could they stay on long enough to climb to the top of the list without a proper place to live or food on the table? Helpless and hopeless, knowing the funds she'd saved up for Petersen would dwindle to nothing once they left the hotel, Maria began a half-hearted search for a job. But she would never be lucky enough to get another position that allowed her to keep Lottie with her during the day, and Lottie was years away from being able to attend a regular school, so what was even the point of looking?

As June turned to July and then to August, throughout the restless nights and burdensome days, the Captain was a constant, hovering presence, like one of the ghosts they'd talked of putting behind them. A dozen times a day or more, she expected the lift doors to slide open and reveal him, thought she heard his deep laugh from the next room, or felt his quiet encouraging presence nearby as she tutored Lottie. Maria gradually came to realize that she missed him more than she ever had during the war, missed him desperately, in fact. Baroness Schrader had only known the half of it: Maria _had _been in love with Captain von Trapp, yes, but eight years later, he had also become a friend to her. "We'll just be good friends," those were the words she'd lobbed at him, words intended to hold him at a distance from her and her patched-up heart. Now the words came back to haunt her, opening a new and entirely different sort of gap in her heart.

As the days went by, it was hard for her to remember that there had been a time when she had boasted of her ability to care for Lottie independently: lately, anxiety left her exhausted by having to do everything on her own. Lottie: there was another source of heartache. The girl asked constantly about the Captain, and Maria was forced to watch the light in the girl's eyes grow dim with disappointment when she had no answers to give.

Maria kept up a brave front for Lottie, for Clara and Susan, and Max, too, never showing her hurt feelings when the only news of Liesl's baby came via Max, never hinting that anything unusual had happened before the Captain's departure. She was grateful that Max proved a loyal friend, still dropping by with music and little gifts, and with great effort, she forced herself to bite back her questions about whether there was any further news from New York.

One evening, Max tinkered at the phonograph while she put Lottie to bed. Maria returned to the salon in time to hear:

_I couldn't sleep_  
_And wouldn't sleep_  
_Until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep_  
_Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I_

_Lost my heart but what of it?_  
_My mistake I agree._  
_He's a laugh, and I love it_  
_Although the laugh's on me._

_Oh I've seen a lot_  
_I mean a lot_  
_And now I'm like sweet seventeen a lot_  
_Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I_

_He's a fool don't I know it_  
_But a fool can have his charms_  
_I'm in love and don't I show it_  
_Like a babe in arms_

At that moment, she was nearly certain she heard her Captain's voice in her ear, like dark honey: "You are _perfect,_ Maria."

Maria burst into tears.

"Maria? What is it, darling?" Max murmured, rushing to her side and offering a handkerchief.

"Were you ever in love, Max?" she sniffed.

"A child like me?" he laughed, but then his expression grew grave. "It's Georg, isn't it? You're in love with him."

She nodded, forlorn.

"Did you let him see how you felt?"

"No. I mean, yes. I mean, we – ehrm-" she stammered, feeling her cheeks flush red.

Max's eyes grew comically wide.

"Maria! You didn't! You _did?_ Do you mean to tell me that you and Georg-"

"Oh, please, Max," she begged, "Please don't ask me that."

Max folded his arms across his chest. "The two of you," he shook his head in mock disgust. "To have taken things all the way into the bedroom and _still _not manage to admit to each other – well, at least I did _my _part," he said loftily.

Maria's curiosity overcame her mortification.

"What are you talking about?"

"You don't think I sent you to that brothel by accident, do you? I thought the two of just needed a push in the right direction. If Georg hadn't been so stubborn that summer, if you hadn't run away just as he – look, Maria. I'm going to assume that for a girl like you, that whatever happened, it wasn't just a fling."

"Of course not!"

"Then why didn't you tell him how you felt?"

"Because. To have asked for his love would have been wrong. I mean, after what he lost."

"That's ridiculous," Max said. "Why, Georg would be the first person to say that at this point, he's been widowed for nearly as long as he's been married. Try again, Maria."

"And – and because – well, I _couldn't_ have told him, Max. I just couldn't!"

"Because?"

"Because," she said slowly, remembering the awful day when she'd been on the verge of doing Reverend Mother's bidding and returning to the villa to confess her feelings to him. She'd been saved from disgrace only when the children intercepted her with news of his engagement to Baroness Schrader. There would have been nothing to save her this time. "It would have been too – too humiliating."

"I see," Max said, stroking his mustache. "Humiliating. Well, then. At least you've got your pride," he said. "And Lottie, of course. You've got Lottie. That will be enough, I'm certain of it."

But he didn't sound certain, not at all.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

On that first night, Georg had arrived in New York in time for supper with Liesl and her Tom. It was strange, to see his daughter enormous with child, bustling about the tiny apartment where the young couple had set up housekeeping while Tom completed his studies to become a high school teacher. Liesl was an heiress, but, like all of his adult children, stubbornly refused to live like one, preferring to make her own way in the world. But she was radiant, and somehow still managed to be light on her feet.

After supper, pleading fatigue, he checked into his hotel, trying not to think of another hotel where a red-headed girl and her mother still resided. But it was no use. He was still settling into his suite when he thought he glimpsed that same little girl peeping out from behind the heavy draperies, and he found himself straining to hear her mother's musical voice from the next room. He made a futile attempt to order the ghosts away as he strode busily about, unpacking. His bags were nearly empty when his fingers closed around an unfamiliar object – a silver whistle, the one Maria had uncovered during their first day back at the villa.

In New York for just a few hours and already defeated by memories! Sighing, Georg dropped the whistle on the nightstand, where he'd be sure to see it in the morning, and got ready for bed.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

The baby was born a week later, a little girl they named Mary Agathe. Georg sent off telegrams to Liesl's brothers and sisters, to Max and other family friends, feeling a little pulse of sadness that his own Agathe had not lived to see this day. Agathe would surely would have been mystified by everything about having a baby in postwar America. His granddaughter had been born in a hospital, his daughter shut away to labor alone, while he kept Tom company in a waiting room. The infant would be fed from glass bottles, and there would be no nursemaid attending her, despite his offer to pay for one. Instead, the exhausted young couple took care of the baby themselves, with only a woman to come in a clean every week.

One familiar pattern he _did _recognize: a few days after Liesl brought her daughter home from the hospital, he found her seated at the kitchen table, weeping, while the baby screamed, unattended, and Tom hovered helplessly nearby.

"I'm a terrible mother," she told them, "and I'm fat, and I wish I we were still in Austria and oh, Father, how I wish that Mama were here!"

"As do I, darling," he murmured, stroking her tangled brown curls. He recognized this phase very well, and was glad to have something to contribute at last, filling Tom's ears with suggestions regarding naps, fresh air, the right sort of visitors, cups of tea, and gifts of jewelry. After a few days, the little household settled down, though, and he was at odd ends again, unsure exactly what the role was of a nineteenth century grandfather in a twentieth century family.

It was a steamy July night when Georg arrived at the couple's apartment to find the table covered with a white cloth and set for four. Liesl was wearing lipstick and even Mary Agathe had a pink ribbon tied around her nearly-bald head.

"Company?" he asked, impressed that his daughter was managing her first child and entertaining with no household help at all.

"Tom insisted it would be good for me. He even cooked the dinner!" Liesl sparkled, and then the company arrived: a middle aged woman with a ready smile, warm coffee-colored eyes and a tumble of black curls threaded with silver.

Tom made the introductions: "Liesl, Georg, this is Peggy Wetherill. She's one of my classmates."

Georg's good manners unfortunately did not hide his confusion. Peggy Wetherill laughed, a deep, rich, unaffected laugh.

"You heard him right. It's Georg, is it?" the woman pronounced his name carefully, a feat most Americans couldn't manage. "I may be old enough to be one of the teachers, but I'm actually one of the students."

It seemed that Peggy had been widowed during the war and had decided to return to college and undertake a new career. "I was heartbroken, of course," she explained briskly. "Still am. Probably always will be. But I'm barely into my fifties! We had no children of our own, so there won't be grandchildren to keep me busy," she sent a smile toward Mary Agathe, cradled in her father's arms. "I can't see moping about another couple of decades waiting to join my husband. I don't think he'd have wanted that for me."

"My apologies for your loss," Georg said a little stiffly. "I myself – Liesl's mother has been gone a dozen years now. It gets easier, I've found," he said soberly.

"Tell me, Peggy," Liesl interrupted, "are you studying to be a science teacher like Tom?"

"No, no. I'm going to become a music teacher. I've played violin and piano since I was a girl. I gave lessons to the neighborhood children, and I always wished for more training, you see."

The evening that followed was most pleasant, with talk of music, of family members, and of Europe's recovery from the war. Georg escorted Peggy out into the street and offered to hail her a taxi. But it turned out her apartment lay in the same direction as his hotel, and they agreed to walk the ten blocks or so, through the warm summer evening.

When they stopped in front of her building, Peggy paused, a question on her face.

"I was thinking, Georg, and I was wondering, if you'd be interested in – there's a Mozart series at Carnegie Hall starting this weekend, and if Liesl and Tom can spare you, I thought you might like to join me. You did say you like Mozart, didn't you?"

"Yes. I do like Mozart," he admitted, "but-ehrm- I'm afraid I'm not able to – that is, I'm not really-,"

"Oh, no!" Peggy looked horrified. "I didn't mean anything like _that!_ I couldn't possibly – I was thinking we might just be good friends."

Despite himself, Georg winced.

"I'm sorry if I offended you," Peggy said awkwardly. "You seem like a kind man. A fine man, Tom tells me, and a brave one. I'm just not looking for that sort of thing anymore."

"I understand completely." He felt himself relax. "I'd like that, the Mozart. And I apologize if I offended _you,_ Peggy. It's just that I," he forced a smile, but he could hear the bitterness leaking into his voice, "I don't do very well, being friends with women. There was one I nearly made the mistake of marrying, until she betrayed me, and then there was another one – I'm afraid I betrayed her."

Peggy pulled her keys from her bag. "Well, let me reassure you that you have nothing to worry about on that account. I'm not interested in marrying anyone, you needn't worry about that. Just looking for some companionship and a bit of music." She turned to unlock the door to her building. "Sunday, then? Carnegie Hall, at three."

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

The next morning, Georg arrived at Liesl's apartment in time for breakfast, bearing a box of pastries. While Mary Agathe lay on a blanket, kicking energetically, Liesl made him a cup of tea and chattered about family news. Friedrich had passed his medical exams and would be arriving in New York before the summer's end. Brigitta wished to read for a law degree. Louisa had met a dashing Spaniard she wanted to bring to London for Christmas to meet the family, and surely that must mean that-

"Liesl, darling," he cleared his throat and set down his teacup, but now Liesl was speaking of Marta and Gretl's summer term. "Liesl!" he said, more sharply this time.

"Yes, Father?"

"It's no use. Peggy Wetherill is a lovely woman, but I'm not looking for female companionship."

"Goodness, Father, you make it sound so indecent!"

"Very well, then, I'm not looking for a wife, either," he chuckled. "I'm too old for that kind of thing."

"For heaven's sake, Father," she chided him, "you're far too young to be giving up on life, and you deserve a bit of happiness after everything you've been through."

"It's strange," he said with a wry smile, "but I seem to remember trying to remarry at one point, over the objections of my children."

"You had the wrong woman," Liesl grimaced. "Poor Baroness Schrader. As I recall, _we_ wanted you to marry Fraulein Maria."

At the mention of Maria's name, something bumped hard against his chest.

"Did I mention," he said lightly, "that I ran into Maria in Salzburg?"

""You mean _Fraulein_ Maria?"

"Yes, yes. She has a little girl now," he said smoothly, keeping his promise not to betray Maria's secret.

"She does?" Liesl was clearly taken aback, but he reminded himself that as far as she knew, Maria had spent the last eight years ensconced behind Nonnberg's stone walls. That's where his memory had left her, too, until his return to Salzburg. "I'll never forget the last time we saw her, when-" she stopped abruptly and bent down to scoop the baby into her arms. "Never mind that. You were saying?"

"Fraulein Maria - I saw quite a bit of her, in fact."

"Did you now?" Liesl raised an eyebrow. "I'm just wondering why you haven't mentioned anything like this before. And why you never said a word about her in your letters, and in all of our reminiscing since you arrived in New York, for all times her name came up, you never-"

"That's enough, Liesl," he said more sharply than he intended, but his daughter just grinned at him. "We became friends, Maria and I, that's all. And what makes you think she'd have an old man like me, anyway?" He made a joke of it, choosing not to dwell on the fact that he had, in fact, proposed marriage to Maria, only to be turned down.

But the conversation with Liesl had awakened something within that refused to be still, an itch under his skin that could not be eased. As the summer crawled by, he kept busy, looking for small opportunities to lend a hand with his granddaughter, helping a newly-arrived Friedrich get established in the city, escorting Peggy Wetherill to concerts every Sunday. Peggy was a wonderful companion, one of those rare souls possessed of both a warm heart and a sharp wit, although on occasion, he could still glimpse the grief for her husband simmering beneath the surface.

Yet, even as his new life in New York took shape, Georg was curiously unsettled. He was a worldly and successful man whose life experiences had always enabled him to move through the world with skill and confidence. So he was surprised to find that while he could function in New York, he didn't much like it. He found himself studiously avoiding the bars that seemed to lurk on every corner, and yet one had to walk for blocks and blocks to find a proper cup of coffee and a piece of pastry. Everything about the city was somehow irritating: too loud, too fast, a bit uncivilized, lacking in charm. Its citizens treated its parks and rivers were more like nuisances than natural assets, and even the way they spoke, with their flat, ugly accents, grated on him.

But surely he could not be homesick, not for Salzburg, the place that had engraved scars of anger and despair on his heart. No, it must be something _else_ that accounted for his mood. It was the heat, he decided, that and the lack of sleep, and noise. And the ghosts. Thankfully, Elsa and Agathe had stayed on their side of the Atlantic, but Lottie and Maria continued to haunt his suite, a small, freckled, red-braided scamp and her mother, she of the remarkable blue eyes, the cloud of golden curls, the wide sweet mouth.

When he thought of Maria now, it wasn't only the minutes she'd spent in his bed, the taste and smell and feel of her, but also the hours they'd spent talking, working side-by-side to clear out the villa, and then lolling by the lake during well-deserved rests. If you had to be kept up half the night by heat and traffic noise, Georg thought, Maria was a problem worthy of careful thought, the many sides of her shimmering in his memory: guileless, determined, incorrigible postulant, enticing young woman with a sharp temper and the voice of an angel, tough-spirited, brave and devoted mother.

_Friends_, he reminded himself. "We'll just be good friends," she'd said to him the night they'd danced together at the Cave, and it was only his brutish lack of self-control that had set things awry. He considered writing her yet again to apologize, but she had drawn a boundary between them, and, already wracked by guilt, he owed it to her not to breach it. The wisest course of action was to step back and make it possible for her to find someone more suitable for a husband. And for Lottie's father.

Autumn came to New York at last, a relief after a summer saturated in sultry heat and dominated by the cruel rhythms of an infant. By September, the warm days, ripe with golden sunlight, were followed by cool evenings. Mary Agathe began to smile, and coo, and keep more regular hours. Tom was busy with his last semester of classes, and student teaching, as was Peggy, who no longer had time for their Sunday musical excursions. In fact, a few weeks went by when he didn't hear from her at all, and then one evening in early October, she telephoned him at the hotel and arranged to meet him the next night, in the hotel's bar.

Georg had been avoiding that bar, or any other bar, since his arrival in New York. Not that Maria or Lottie would know the difference, he told himself, slouching into a booth and defiantly ordering a whiskey. Over in the corner, a pianist warmed up, with soft, easy runs.

"Georg, dear. Here you are!" Peggy slid into the other side of the booth, her brown eyes flickering to the glass of whisky before meeting his. "It's lovely to see you. I've let far too much time go by. Champagne for me," she told the waiter.

"Good to see you as well," Georg nodded. "Schoolwork, I know. Why, Tom says-"

Peggy took a deep breath and leaned forward before the words came pouring out of her.

"It's not just school. The truth is, I've – well, I've met someone. A man. His name is Henry. He owns a bookshop downtown. I've been quiet about it, not wanting to hope too much, you know, but," her brown eyes sparkled with glee, "you know, I'm pretty sure he's courting me!"

"A man!" Georg felt his eyebrows lift to the ceiling. "Courting you?"

Peggy laughed, her low rich laugh.

"Is it that much of a surprise? I mean, I know how it must look, a woman my age."

"Don't be ridiculous!" Georg objected. "You're a fine-looking woman. I've enjoyed every minute we've spent together. It's just that – weren't you the one who wasn't looking for –ehrm – for this sort of thing?"

"This sort of _love,_ you mean?" Peggy beamed. "Yes, that was me, but I was wrong. Because even a broken heart heals, it turns out. Don't you remember what you told me, the day we met? That it gets easier? The only question, Georg, is why _you _haven't found someone to love. There was someone, wasn't there? I remember you telling me-"

"The one I very nearly married, until she betrayed me?" he grumbled.

"No, the other one," Peggy persisted.

"No. _No,_" he said firmly. "She was a friend, until I – I spoiled it."

"For good? Perhaps it was just some sort of misunderstanding. Did you let her see how you feel?"

"Of course not, Peggy."

"Why not?"

"I'm too old," he started to say, but Peggy was his contemporary, and her jubilant announcement gave lie to that excuse. "For one thing," he said instead, "she's much too independent. I need someone who needs me desperately. Or at least needs my money desperately. And it doesn't matter anymore. She's in Europe, and I'm here, and I doubt she'd ever forgive me for – ehrm-"

"Are you sure? Don't you want to know for sure? Take it from me, Georg, if you have even a small chance of this kind of happiness, the kind you don't dare to dream of finding twice - oh, Georg, you must find out for sure. You must go back!"

Georg opened his mouth to object when the first soft piano chords floated out into the room, and the lights lowered. He was left to shift restlessly in the booth, his fingers tapping on the table's polished surface, his hand inching toward the glass of whiskey that sat, untouched, before him. Across from him, Peggy's gaze was fixed on the stage. He stuffed his hand into his pocket and found the silver whistle waiting for him to clutch against his palm.

'The kind of happiness you don't dream of finding twice,' Peggy had said.

Her words made Georg think first of Agathe, his first and only love, a woman he'd lusted after so much that he' d willingly put aside his rakish ways to marry her. He never could have foreseen that her true gift to him would be her loyalty and encouragement at the end of the first war, which had lifted him from despair and saved his life. Then there was Elsa, whom he did not desire, whose friendship had buoyed him and brought some meaning back into his life, but whose loyalty to him had its limits. Peggy Wetherill, too, had been a good friend, but his time with Elsa had taught him not to confuse friendship with lust or love.

What was Maria's place in all of this? Georg worried the silver whistle between his fingers and let his mind run over their acquaintance, looking for clues, from that first meeting in the ballroom, to that last heartbreaking moment when the lift doors had closed between them.

There was a burst of applause when an dark-skinned brunette, elegant in a yellow-satin sheath, appeared from out of the gloom, grasped the microphone and began to sing.

_If they asked me, I could write a book  
__About the way you walk, and whisper, and look.  
__I could write a preface  
__On how we met  
__So the world would never forget.  
__And the simple secret of the plot  
__Is just to tell them that I love you a lot.  
__And the world discovers  
__As my book ends,  
__How to make two lovers  
__Of friends._

Peggy's words echoed in his head: 'The kind of happiness you don't dream of finding twice.'

Suddenly, something with him shifted, like a key fitting a lock, opening a door so that love and lust, friendship and loyalty, rushed in, surging to fill his heart with joy, with joy and with –

With hope.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**

**Thank you for reading my story, and I would love it if you left me a review. Two more of my favorite songs, both from the 1940 musical Pal Joey: **_**Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered**_** and **_**If they Asked Me. **_** A special H/T to bloomandgrow, whose review, way back in Chapter 2, proposed that Max intentionally sent Maria to that brothel, knowing she would boomerang back into Georg's life. I didn't think of it at the time I wrote it that way but it makes sense. Not only was that her idea, but I don't own anything else about TSOM, I do this for love.**


	9. The Autumn, Plentiful with Gifts

**THE AUTUMN, PLENTIFUL WITH GIFTS**

Living alone with Lottie meant living in silence. On those rare occasions when the telephone's shrill ring cut through the stillness, it was always either Clara or Max on the line. But when Maria went to answer the telephone one October morning, an unfamiliar voice identified himself as Captain von Trapp's solicitor. He was calling to inform her that the villa had been sold.

"Our firm will handle the sale, and as Captain von Trapp currently has no further connection to Salzburg, his arrangement with the Hotel Bristol will terminate at the end of the month," the man said briskly.

Maria heard herself making the requested assurances that she'd vacate the suite by the end of October. Even though she'd known it was inevitable, the news still came as a shock. After ringing off, she looked around the cavernous space, remembering the March afternoon when she and Lottie had followed the Captain here, after encountering him in the café across the street. Somehow, that visit had turned into a six month sojourn, and what had seemed a luxurious but uninviting hotel suite had become home to both of them.

With October already half-gone, Maria found herself plunged into a scramble for new housing, barely noticing as fall's splendor showed signs of giving way to the coming winter. The Captain was still never far from her mind, but now she found herself wondering if he was still as unsentimental about the villa as he'd seemed during their long workdays there. True, the Nazis' tenancy had left a stain on her memories of the Aigen, just as it must have for the Captain, a stain that no work crew could ever erase. But for both of them, the villa had been the site of tremendous joy as well as sorrow.

It was hard to imagine another family living there, making all of it – the lakeside, the library, the nursery, the salon, the kitchen – their own. Would it be another large family? Maria remembered Frau Schmidt explaining that the Captain had purchased the villa shortly before Liesl's birth, so perhaps the new tenants would be another pair of newlyweds planning to build a family. Either way, she hoped they would have all of the delights and none of the losses that had beset the Captain and his children. Her own stay there had been so brief, less than three months, but it had altered the course of her life, had led her away from service to God and toward a still-uncertain future devoted to Lottie.

During their last weeks at the hotel, Maria slept very little, and when she did, she was plagued by the same vivid dream: she was back at the villa, where in the distance, she could hear the children's voices raised in the Edelweiss song. But although she searched every corridor, every room, every inch of the property, she couldn't find them. While their voices came at her from every direction, they remained maddeningly out of reach.

The end of October rushed relentlessly toward her, with each day shorter and chillier than the one before. Maria and Lottie would be leaving the hotel for good on the last day of the month, a Friday morning, in favor of temporary quarters Max had been kind enough to arrange, and which she really couldn't afford. By the time Thursday dawned, cloudy and cool, Maria was beginning to wonder if the persistent dream was going to chase her to their new home. She found herself overcome with the desire to see the villa one more time, even as she knew it would upset Lottie to be reminded of the Captain. Still, she could leave Lottie with Clara, take the bus to Aigen, and be back in time for lunch.

But "Oh! I can't - oh, dear! I - ehrm - I'm sorry, Maria," Clara apologized over the telephone. "I've got – well, I've got something else to do this morning. It's just that I – would you mind - can you bring Lottie to me this afternoon instead? Around teatime?"

It was unlike Clara to fret so, and over such a minor inconvenience, as though she weren't the one doing Maria a favor. How kind Clara was to Lottie! Her private lessons for deaf children were in greater demand than ever. It was even rumored that there were families who had moved to Salzburg just to be near her. And still, she was so generous, continuing to help Lottie out whenever there was a spare moment to do so, with no hope of payment.

And so it was after three o'clock when Maria climbed on the familiar bus to Aigen for the very last time. But it wasn't very long after her arrival at the villa before she saw that the expedition had been a waste of time, and that whatever resolution she'd hoped to achieve would remain elusive. For one thing, she ought to have known that the house would be locked up tight, although even through a sparkling-clean ground floor window, she could see that the work crews had left their mark. She had the impression of polished floors, emptily echoing rooms, draped chandeliers, everything utterly spotless and still. Similarly, around back of the house, the garden had been clipped into orderly rectangles, and by this time of year there were no flowers or foliage to soften the severe look, only bare tree branches stabbing at the lowering sky. The whole place was anonymous, lifeless, bereft of meaning and memory. It was as though everything that had come before this moment had been the dream.

Maria even found herself wishing for a glimpse of one of those unsettling ghosts that she and the Captain had joked about – Brigitta climbing a tree, Kurt chasing Louisa across the lawns, Gretl scampering toward her with outstretched arms – but now, even the ghosts had forsaken the place. She wandered along the lakeside path toward the old gazebo, lost in memories of the magical summer she'd spent tending the von Trapp children, and of this past spring when her friendship with the Captain had come to mean so much to her, until it exploded into passion that left only cinders behind. Now the only thing that remained of that friendship was a dull but ever-present ache.

How long did she sit in the gazebo, staring out at the steel-gray lake? An hour or two, at least. Slumped onto one of the stone benches, Maria lost track of time, for the short and sunless autumn afternoon did not offer the usual cues: no golden fire shimmered across the water, and the mountain lay hidden in dark-green shadow. As the afternoon wore on, instead of the friendly summer-afternoon song of chittering insects she'd been accustomed to, there was silence, broken only by the lonely sound of fallen leaves skittering along the path and, after a while, a tap-tap-tap that sounded like footsteps.

When she looked up, it was almost a relief to spy one of the ghosts at last: the Captain, not as she'd known him this past spring, of course, but wearing one of the Trachten jackets he'd worn eight years earlier. The ghostly figure wore a strangely tentative expression on his face, as though he wasn't sure he belonged there.

Then he spoke.

"Hello!"

A sharp fall breeze needled its way beneath Maria's shirtwaist until she shivered.

"_Y-you_!" she stammered.

This was no ghost. He was real, this Captain, and as if to confirm it, he raised his hand to his heart, even as his face regained its composure.

"I thought I just might find you here!" he announced nonchalantly, his casual manner suggesting they'd just parted a few hours ago. He was even more than she remembered: more handsome, more broad-shouldered, more _everything. _

"But how – why -?"

"Hm? Well. I had something to give you. Something it seemed best to deliver in person. May I?" he gestured politely at the bench where she sat, and after she managed a mute nod, he seated himself a sizable distance away from her. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he withdrew a small stack of identical, pristine white envelopes. He placed all but one of the envelopes in a tidy pile on the bench in between them, and extended the remaining one to her.

"Go ahead and open it," he directed.

The envelope held two small photographs, one of a smiling young couple and the other of a grave marker.

"That couple," he cleared his throat, "those are Lottie's parents. Her father was conscripted, three months after she was taken from them, and died at the front within weeks. There wasn't enough left of him to bury. The mother died six months later, giving birth to Lottie's brother, although the boy never drew a breath. He was buried there," he gestured toward the second photograph, "in his mother's arms."

"But how-?"

"I sent Petersen to Poland three weeks ago. He talked to what's left of the families."

Lottie's sweet freckled face rose up in front of Maria even when she squeezed her eyes shut against the bitter tears. Although she'd always anticipated this outcome, her heart ached in sympathy for the heartbroken parents and an orphaned little girl who, like herself, would always strain to remember a mother and father who were lost to her.

"You'll have to decide what to tell her," he said gently, "now, and when she's older. If I can be of any help-"

Maria wanted to weep – with grief for Lottie, with relief for herself, with gratitude for the Captain's generous gesture. But in the awkward silence that followed, other emotions rushed in. There was the shocking reality of his solid presence next to her – she still couldn't quite believe he was _here_! – and then there was the remembered anguish he had caused her and Lottie. He had broken off their lovemaking as though it were a little more than a card game, offered her a marriage of convenience and lectured her as to his limited feelings for her. He might admire her, and care for Lottie, but he had abandoned both of them.

"I thought I told you," Maria lashed out, "to stay out of it."

"I know. But if you haven't realized it by yet, Petersen's an extortionist. Let me guess: he told you that the longer you waited, the higher the price would be, which of course would mean a longer wait, and thus a higher fee, and so on. He'd have strung you along for years, Maria. I gave him half-again more than the price he demanded and three weeks to finish the job, and that was all there was to it. If you insist, you can pay me back, although I suspect neither one of us will live long enough for that."

Simple courtesy required her to acknowledge his gesture, even as the scars he had left on her heart made her belittle it.

"I appreciate what you've done for Lottie, Captain, but it's not going to make a difference, you know. They still won't let me keep her."

"Ah. Well, as for that," he took up a second envelope and extended it to her. "Open this one."

Her eyes ran over the single page, picking out the words. Decree. Hearing.

"I don't understand." Maria fought off the rising panic. "Am I in some sort of trouble?"

"Not in the least. You have a hearing at 10 am tomorrow, in the Mayor's office. But it's just a formality, really. The documents have already been drawn up. I saw them myself: an adoption decree and a new birth certificate. That's all that's required for Lottie to be yours, as though you'd given birth to her yourself. No husband required."

"I don't understand," she could only repeat herself. "I mean, everyone says that unless-"

"You may recall that the Mayor was after me for months about the bridges. And serving on his committees. _And _heaven knows what other nonsense. Even when I escaped to New York, he kept after me. I have agreed to act as a sort of advisor to him, and in return," he shrugged carelessly, "well, that's the way things have always worked in Salzburg."

She could barely grasp the enormity of it: Lottie was hers forever.

"I – ehrm –"

The situation was impossible: having thoroughly broken her heart four months ago, he was now granting its greatest desire. Maria stole a sideways glance at the Captain, who looked totally at ease, smug and even a little gleeful, as though he were winning a game she didn't even know they were playing.

"I sold the villa, you know," he told her. "Aren't you curious about the new owner?"

"No. Why would I be?"

"Because I sold it to someone you know," he said cheerfully, stretching his long legs out in front of him. "One Miss Clara Armstrong."

"Clara? _The_ Clara? My Clara? The governess?"

"M-hm."

"But that's impossible! Clara doesn't have that kind of money!"

"Well, I didn't sell it to her personally, of course. It's in her capacity as – well, this will explain it," he chose a third envelope, the thickest one in the pile, and handed it to her.

Maria tore open the envelope and stared at the contents, a many-paged document that bristled with various seals and stamps. "What does this have to do with Clara?"

"Your Miss Armstrong and I spent the morning with my solicitor. She's the one who told me where to find you, in case you were wondering. Everyone's been under orders not to breathe a word of the arrangement until we closed the deal today, but, you see, I've chartered a school. A school for deaf children. It will be located here at the villa, and Clara will be serving as its director. I can report first-hand that Miss Armstrong is a _very _tough negotiator. While I will chair the board, I'm afraid she's consigned me to being little more than a figurehead. The charter grants her complete control over the facility," he waved his hand in the direction of the big house, "the curriculum, the faculty, staffing, hiring, that sort of thing. My only stipulation is that they offer generous scholarships to children from limited circumstances."

Lottie was hers forever, Clara was going to have her school, and Lottie might have a place in it. Yet suspicion lay like a stone in Maria's belly.

"Children like Lottie, I take it."

"Yes, that's the general idea, although it really is entirely up to the school's director. As was this," and he extended the fourth envelope to her.

The contents of this envelope needed no explanation: it was a letter offering Maria employment as a teacher at the school, beginning after the first of the year, with no further details other than a reasonable salary.

"Captain, why did you take it on yourself to interfere in this fashion? You made it very clear that you wanted nothing more from me, and I felt the same way in return. You owe me nothing, and I owe you nothing. I thought we were agreed on that!" She looked warily at the single remaining envelope on the bench, glowing white in the shadowy gloom of the gazebo. What further tie would it create to the man who had caused her and her daughter such misery? "I know you mean well, but this puts me in a very difficult position."

"I told you, the matter of your employment is entirely between you and Clara," he said with a tight-lipped smile.

"That is not what I mean, and you know it. But never mind. I know why you've gone to all of this trouble."

"You do?" He raised his eyebrows. "That's a relief. Because it's been a bit of a struggle to understand it myself. Why, I mean."

"Isn't it obvious?" she took a deep breath and tried to steady her voice. "You feel sorry for us. For Lottie, of course, but also for me. You feel sorry for us, and also, you regret having – ehrm – you feel guilty about what happened between the two of us at the end, and so quite naturally, you are trying to buy your way out of it."

"I don't regret it," he said, so quietly she barely heard him.

"But I don't want your pity, and moreover – what?"

"I don't regret it," he repeated. "I _do_ feel guilty, you're right about that. Any man would, in these circumstances, and your failure to understand why, is the very reason I feel guilty, because underneath all that – ehrm – frisky behavior of yours, you really are still an innocent. I behaved dishonorably, but God help me, I don't regret it. And I didn't come here out of pity. I came back because – ehrm – well, I came back for _you_, Maria."

"_The Captain would hardly be a man if he didn't notice you. Nothing's more irresistible to a man than a woman who's in love with him."_

Baroness Schrader might as well have been right at her elbow. The memory of their last conversation came roaring back, as sharp and clear as though it had been eight minutes and not eight years ago, and on the heels of that memory, it was easy to recall the sting of his casual rejection just a few minutes before that.

"_You can if you want to."_

Maria shook herself back to the present. The Captain had risen to his feet and begun to pace the gazebo's perimeter, hands clasped behind his back. His relaxed demeanor had given way to something much more unsettled.

"Back then? That summer? I'll admit it, I wanted you almost from the start. I was unspeakably ashamed of myself. I would try to force myself to imagine you wearing a wimple, or on your knees in prayer, except then that would make me think about – well, I pushed those thoughts away, of course -"

"Of course you did," she said tartly.

"Have you forgotten, Maria, that you were promised to God? I felt like the lowest sort of disgraceful wretch. I had my eyes closed so tightly against the truth that I failed to notice that I," he ran his hands through his hair, "that I– ehrm – I had grown rather fond of you."

"That's very kind of you, Captain, but-"

"I have not finished yet!" he barely paused for breath before rushing on, as though he was relying on momentum to get through the rest of it. "When I met up with you again, last spring? I was _exhausted _from holding my family together in exile, not to mention shocked and disgusted by what the world had done to itself. Sometimes I thought that the war had left me half-dead as well, although I told myself I was lucky compared to so many others, which only made me feel more like an ungrateful wretch. But then you and Lottie came along. I ought to have seen it then, but you were always prattling on about how we were friends. 'Just friends, Captain.' You must have said it a thousand times! Refusing to use my _name, _for God's sake. Why, I haven't been anyone's Captain in decades! Then there was all that talk about your cavorting your way across Switzerland-"

"I did not _cavort_!" but he ignored her protest.

"That, and Liesl married and expecting a baby, and – I just felt _old_. Old and of no use to anyone. Disgusted that I had lost control of myself with you, only to learn that what you really needed - and so I left. I made a mistake, letting myself lose hope. I was afraid, if you can believe it. I couldn't imagine a future in which - I thought you and Lottie both deserved someone younger, someone less complicated. I made it a point to remain out of contact with you, even though an hour didn't pass when you weren't on my mind. Because the thing of it is – well, nothing was the same while I was away, and it will be all wrong again if I leave. And the reason for that, Maria, is – God help me – I'm in love with you. Perhaps I was, eight years ago, but of course I had no idea I could have you. Or perhaps I wasn't ready to – well, anyway. There you have it." He stopped his pacing abruptly, so that he came to rest standing right in front of her. "It appears that I've been in love with you, and for quite some time."

His words floated out over her head, and disappeared into the gray dusk. It was so quiet that Maria could hear the sharp evening breeze ruffling through the trees.

"_What makes it so nice is he thinks he's in love with you." _

"I know," she said faintly.

"You did? I mean, you do?"

"I – I mean, I did, yes, back then. But that was a long time ago. A very, very, _very_ long time ago. What I don't understand, Cap – ehrm - is what it was that made you come back? And why, after all this time, you are telling me this now?"

"Why now? The answer's right there next to you, Maria. In the last envelope."

She tore open the envelope and perused the marriage license for no more than a few seconds before letting it drop to the ground, as though it were on fire and might scorch her fingers.

"_Don't take it to heart. He'll get over it soon enough, I think."_

"I'm sorry. It's very kind of you, but I already told you that I cannot marry you just because you feel sorry for me."

"Not half so sorry as I'm feeling for myself," he muttered, looking more and more bewildered with every moment. "Have you been listening to me, Maria? If you were ever a charity case, you aren't one anymore. I may have done a bit of meddling up front, but as a result, now you have everything you need. A livelihood, your daughter, and the chance to give her a bright future. You told me you wanted your independence, and now that you have it, why, I thought you would -"

"Of course I'm grateful-"

"_Grateful?_" he gritted.

"It's you who didn't listen to me," Maria folded her arms across her chest. "I told you the last time that I don't love you."

She could see his jaw clench and his when his gaze locked on hers, his eyes had turned to blue ice.

"Is that the truth? Or are you lying to me again? Ever since we met up last spring, you gave me – well, we both know what you gave me, don't we? Everything but the truth. All those months when you evaded my questions. When you told me lie after lie. Is it any wonder I don't know what to believe?"

"That is not fair and you know it," she snapped. "I apologized for having deceived you about Lottie. Why, you are the only one who knows the truth about her!"

"All right, then," he said evenly, "then if you're in the mood to be truthful, tell me this. That summer, Maria. The night of the party. What was it that made you run away to the Abbey?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, not this again! I missed the Abbey, just as I said in my note."

"Oh-ho! I thought the reason no longer existed," he taunted her now, eyes narrowed with suspicion, shaking his finger in her face. "Have you forgotten your lines, Maria? Or are you lying to me still?"

For one wild moment, Maria considered telling him the truth: _I always loved you and I always will._ If she owned up to her feelings, then he would take her in his arms and kiss her, the way he had that sultry June night. And then what? She felt the hard lump that had formed in her chest begin to melt at the memory of his mouth and hands on her skin, and the rasp of his breath in her ears. She found herself considering the narrow stone bench that ringed the gazebo: was it possible for two people to make love in such confined circumstances? And suppose they did? What would happen after that? She already knew the answer. The last time she'd gone into his arms, and then into his bed, he'd crossed an ocean to escape her.

By now, as surely as the day's last dull light had worn away, hope had drained from his face entirely, leaving only hard lines behind. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them, his gaze was fixed over her head, looking out toward the lake.

"Well, then," he said in an oddly formal fashion. "I can see that I was mistaken."

Then he was crossing the gazebo in long, purposeful strides, until he reached the doorway and turned to face her one last time.

"You want to know why I came back here? Because I hoped – you see, Maria, I'm not a young man anymore, but it seems that I'm not quite ready to be an old one. Even though I'm a wealthy man, the world has changed so much that I don't seem to belong anywhere. Twenty years ago, I lost my country and the chance to serve her honorably. A dozen years ago, I lost my precious wife. I spent six years in exile and raised seven children all by myself! And in all those years, the one single thing that taught me how to hope, _t_he one _person-" _he let out a heartfelt sigh. "Do you know, I haven't ever spoken in this fashion to anyone. Not even in twenty years of marriage. I'm not even sure I ever thought of such things. Ah, well. I suppose a man can only reinvent himself so many times."

"We don't always get what we want," Maria shrugged, although she wasn't sure which one of them she was admonishing.

"It wasn't a question of what I wanted. Or not only that. It was more a matter of what I needed, you see." He was already speaking in the past tense, and peering at her in the half-light, as though he wasn't sure he recognized her. "You know, Maria, when you told me that story about taking Lottie and the two boys across the mountains, I thought to myself it was the bravest thing I'd ever known any woman to do. And then there was the way you were willing to risk everything to keep your promise to Lottie. To me, you will always be my brave little governess. Even if I don't understand why you won't take a chance on me."

He shook his head and lifted his hands in a gesture that, for another man, would have meant surrender. Then, without another word, he turned and left the gazebo, disappearing into the gathering dusk, until the only thing left of him was the tap-tap-tap of his footsteps on the path that would take him away from her forever.

Brave? Maria had always thought of her Captain as the brave one, what with his medals and his name in the history books. Yet she knew him well enough to also understand that it had taken a very different kind of courage for him to come clean to her. He was right: she'd never heard him talk so openly about himself, and what was written on his heart, not even that day when everything had changed between him and his children. And now here she stood, loving him as much as ever, but afraid. Afraid of – of what, exactly? Humiliation? Another insult to her foolish pride?

This time it was Max at her elbow, stroking his mustache, his voice kind.

"_At least you've got your pride. And Lottie, of course. That will be enough. I'm certain of it."_

What would have happened if she hadn't run from the Baroness in the first place? Or if she'd had the chance to do as Reverend Mother had counseled and faced her fears? If Mother were here, Maria knew very well what she'd say. Baroness Schrader had humiliated her, but Maria had survived that, and much worse. Lottie and Nico and Mikel, for example. With God's help, she had gotten those children over a mountain all by herself. She had saved their lives!

How Maria wanted to call out to him! She wanted to, desperately now, but the words refused to form on her lips, and her mouth had gone dry. She swallowed back a lump of fear and stubbornness and regret and longing and shame, and she tried, but there was nothing but a strangled noise. She swallowed again and forced out a single word, on nothing more than a whisper.

"_You."_

**OOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**

**Sorry this took so long – I originally wrote it right through to the end but it was sooooo long! So one more chapter after this one. I would love it if you left me a review, as I have found the reviews quite helpful. For example, I could see from the reviews that Georg's behavior was hard to understand and forgive, and that's why he talks and talks and talks and talks his way out of trouble in this chapter. Speaking of Georg, w****hen I was planning this story, I found a poem by Pablo Neruda (and you know I love Neruda) that really explained Georg's POV, and maybe if I had used it, his bad behavior would have been easier to understand. Here it is, and I let it inspire the title of this chapter:**

_**Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:**_  
_** I wavered through the streets, among**_  
_** Objects:**_  
_** Nothing mattered or had a name:**_  
_** The world was made of air, which waited.**_

_**I knew rooms full of ashes,**_  
_** Tunnels where the moon lived,**_  
_** Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',**_  
_** Questions that insisted in the sand.**_

_**Everything was empty, dead, mute,**_  
_** Fallen abandoned, and decayed:**_  
_** Inconceivably alien, it all**_

_**Belonged to someone else – to no one:**_  
_** Till your beauty and your poverty**_  
_** Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts. **_

**Anyway, thank you for the reviews, don't own, all for love. **

**OOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**


	10. As Though They Knew the Way

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**Let me begin with an apology. When I started this story way back in June, I suspected that a huge life transition (a good one, but a big and scary one) was in the offing, but I thought I'd be able to fit this story in under the wire before it happened. And I almost made it! Except for the last chapter! The truth is, this last part was about 70% written but I just couldn't get that last bit done before things picked up speed in late September. The next thing I knew, the year was gone. I am so sorry to have left the story hanging for so long, and I wouldn't blame my readers for having lost the thread of what was happening (I had to go back and read the last chapter myself!), or even for no longer caring. Please enjoy it, no pressure to review, and please accept my wishes for a happy holiday and new year.**

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**AS THOUGH THEY KNEW THE WAY**

"_You."_

The tapping footsteps came to a sudden halt as his voice pierced the shadows.

"What's that?"

"_You_," she said shakily_. "_It was _always _you. Surely you must know that."

"Then why won't you marry me, Maria? Did what happened in my bed frighten you? Because I promise you, it doesn't have to be that way. I know I behaved like – but I thought you were - if I had known, I would have-"

"_No!_" Maria felt her face flush hot with embarrassment. "No, that was _fine._ I mean – oh, dear! Not _fine, _that's not – what I meant to say was – ehrm – it was much better than fine," she finished lamely.

There was a strangled sound which might have been a laugh cut short.

"Then what is it? Let's hear it. Out with it. Now."

The words floated toward her from the shadows that surrounded the gazebo, his voice commanding, but warm, too. It occurred to her that it might be easier to try and explain things while he remained hidden from sight. This way, she would not have to witness his expression if his face betrayed amusement at how a foolish girl's embarrassment and humiliation, over the course of a single evening eight years ago, had shaped everything that came after. Maria took a deep breath, and then the floodgates opened and the story came tumbling out.

"That summer. You think _you _were ashamed of your feelings? I came here on God's errand. I wanted nothing more from life than to serve Him, and then I found myself with these _feelings_. At first, I thought it was a harmless little secret, like a sweet one tucks away in a pocket to be enjoyed later, in private. It never even occurred to me to confess it, because it didn't even seem sinful, not really, just an innocent crush, the kind girls have all the time. And you were getting married, anyway, everyone said so. I thought I'd leave at the end of the summer and that would be it. Until-"

"Until?" the voice prompted, deep and warm.

"The Laendler. You think you took my innocence at the Hotel Bristol, but it was that dance, and the way you looked at me at the end, like you wanted to devour me. Even if you _did_ freeze me out a few minutes later. And then Baroness Schrader-"

"Elsa?" he said sharply. "What about Elsa?"

"When I went upstairs to change, she followed me. She told me that I was in love with you, and that you _thought _you loved me, but you'd get over it soon enough. She said it as though it was obvious! As plain to see as the Untersberg, as though anyone could see it, as though everyone _had_ seen it_._ I felt as though I had been paraded naked through that party! All I could think about was how to get away, to the Abbey, where I'd be safe."

"I swear, Maria, I had no idea that Elsa had-"

"And another thing. It's not quite up there with crossing the Alps, or sinking enemy ships, but if you want to talk about acts of bravery, a week or two later, while I was still at the Abbey, I agreed – well, Reverend Mother made me, actually, but still – I was going to come back here and tell you how I felt. Can you imagine? I was going to march into the foyer and announce that I lo-" the word stuck on her tongue.

"Go ahead and say it, Maria."

All around them, the world held its breath.

"That I l-l-love you."

"Ah. I see." A long, heavy pause. "Then why didn't you? Come back, I mean."

"Because I was about to get on the bus when the children arrived at the Abbey a second time, with news of your impending marriage. And then after that – well, I could hardly take my vows, could I? Not after baring my soul to Reverend Mother. She promised me I would find the life I was born to live, and you know, once God sent Lottie to me, I really did. Honestly, I had no regrets. The time we spent in Switzerland – it's true what everyone told you. I had quite a lot of fun. I _did _kiss quite a few men. And every single time, I would think back to that dance, and how I knew _you_ had wanted to kiss me, and how I would never know what it would have been like – ehrm -"

Although she couldn't see him, Maria clung to the knowledge of his presence, and that steady, reassuring voice, laced with tenderness.

"If it had been me?" he said gently.

"Y- yes. But of course, I assumed that you were married. Happily, I hoped, and so at least the children had a new mother. And then our paths crossed again, and I found out the truth. I let that woman chase me away and then you never even married her!"

"I didn't love her."

"You went looking for her, though, didn't you?" Maria surprised herself with her bitter tone.

"That was guilt, darling, not love."

_Darling._ The word felt like a caress.

"Maria, you must please try to remember that I thought _you_ had run away from _me. _And I thought you were safe behind the walls of Nonnberg Abbey. _And_ I didn't need to go looking for you, because you were with me in Switzerland, the whole time. In a way, I mean, because your – your influence – I don't honestly think I could have held them together for all those years if it hadn't been for the way you had brought us together as a family."

"I'm glad for that," she told him, and then they lapsed into an unsettled silence for a long minute before he spoke again.

"Well. I do thank you for the explanation. There were certain things I had not understood, and the bit about Elsa - it all makes more sense now. You love me, Maria, and what has it gotten you in return? You've done so beautifully on your own, and every time I – oh, God." He let out a harsh choking sound.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

"The one time you took a chance, when you gave me the precious gift of yourself, I acted as though you had done something shameful, when in truth, I was the one who ought to have been ashamed. I don't blame you for sending me away." He paused. "_Are_ you sending me away?"

Maria felt wrung out of emotion, fragile as a bubble.

"I don't know! I don't _know_!"

"Listen, Maria. After everything that's happened, it's no wonder you're afraid to need me. But you _don't _need me, not anymore. You have your independence. You have your daughter, and a livelihood, and the chance to give her a bright future. Don't marry me because you need me, Maria, marry me because you want me. And because _I_ need _you._"

"But – but you're through with Austria. I heard you say so myself, and more than once! And I _can't _leave Austria, I just can't! Not now, not with the school and a chance for Lottie to-"

"You needn't worry about that," he reassured her. "If you – if we - I wouldn't be able to leave Austria, either. Not if my wife and daughter were here." Maria's heart skipped a beat, hearing how easily he spoke of it, making something ordinary out of what at one time would have been simply unthinkable. "The older children will be in New York and London and heaven knows where else, and I would like us to spend some time visiting them. Introducing them to Lottie. But no, it seems that I'm not done with Austria after all. The Mayor wouldn't hear of it anyway. I even came dressed for the part! Or didn't you notice?" There was the sound of a few brisk steps and he emerged from the shadows, gesturing at his Trachten jacket with an awkward smile.

"I don't know," Maria bit her lip. "Eight years. So much has happened along the way. How do we even know where to pick up again?"

"Perhaps I was a bit too optimistic, coming at you this way, but the marriage license won't expire. If it takes you a while – hell, if it takes you eight more years to accept me, I'll wait."

"Don't be ridiculous!"

"I mean it," he insisted. "Even if it takes another eight years, I'm willing to wait. Not only that, but I'll try my best not to get any older in the meantime," he said with a wry smile. "But I don't think we ought to try and pick up where we left off. What was it you used to say, about starting at the very beginning?"

"What do you mean?" she said warily.

"Follow me," he motioned with his chin for her to follow as he executed a sharp half-turn and started up the path toward the villa, while Maria, letting curiosity overcome caution, scuttled along behind him. Up ahead, a few lights had been left burning in the empty villa, just enough to show the way as he led her onto the side terrace where they'd danced together eight years ago.

"No gloves this time," he apologized. "Let's see now. I think-" Brow furrowed in concentration, he reached behind her and drew her left hand into his, while he raised their clasped right hands high in the air and began to spin them, round and round, until she was just the slightest bit dizzy, so that when he stopped, the world fell away, eight years were nothing more than a moment, and there was only the soft brush of his mouth on hers.

"There." He drew back, looking pleased with himself. "That's more like it, don't you think?"

He was watching her carefully, with the same blue gaze she remembered from the first time they had danced here, a gaze hungry but tender, too. But this time, he opened his arms to her. Maria banked her fears and went to him without hesitation, feeling his arms fold her gently against his chest, until she could hear the reassuring steady thump of his heart.

Until, suddenly, "What the hell?" he barked, holding her away from him. "What's happened to you?"

"What? Why - ?"

"You are like a bag of bones, is what!" He let his hands settle around her waist with a confidence that she ought to have found presumptuous but was actually oddly comforting. "What happened to all those delightful curves? Hasn't the Hotel Bristol been feeding you?"

"I don't know. I suppose I've been all out of sorts," Maria explained. "Like you said, nothing was the same anymore. Even poor Lottie – oh _no_!" she startled. "Lottie! What time is it? I left her with Clara hours ago. They must be frantic!"

"It's nearly seven, darling. But you needn't worry about Lottie. Or Clara. I took care of them."

"What does that mean?"

"When I saw Clara this morning, and she told me she was going to look after Lottie while you came out here, I asked her if she wouldn't mind keeping Lottie until – well, let's just say that she told me to take all the time I needed," he said, with a wicked gleam in his eye. "I wasn't sure what would happen when I approached you."

"I don't know," Maria rolled her eyes, "you seem awfully sure of yourself to me. Making arrangements for my daughter."

"Well, I _wasn't_ sure of myself, not at all. I've been running about like a madman for three weeks, making these arrangements from the other side of the ocean. I haven't slept in two days, either, flying here overnight, and then spending the morning shut up in my solicitor's office. I also haven't eaten anything since landing this morning. And you could definitely use a good meal," he gave her arm a gentle squeeze. "So while we can stay out here talking all night, I have a better idea."

"Which is?"

"Follow me, Fraulein Maria."

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

On a late-fall Thursday night, the café at the Hotel Bristol was not terribly crowded. Only a few couples circled the small dance floor, moving to music provided by a trio tucked away in a corner. The waiter must have remembered how this same pair had hovered at the edge of the elegant space all last spring, because could not do enough for them. He seated Maria at a banquette and, with a flourish, pulled out the chair opposite for the Captain and waved away their orders, assuring them he would see to their meal personally.

As soup and fish courses appeared on the table, the conversation flowed easily, touching on news of Lottie, Mary Agathe and the seven von Trapp children. Maria offered advice about the problems of Brigitta's studies, Kurt's lackadaisical attitude and Louisa's boyfriend, and sought advice on Lottie's latest shenanigans in return.

By the time they had moved onto the main courses, the conversation had shifted to the months they'd spent apart – her struggles to find work and housing, and his friendship with a widow named Peggy– and then, as they grew more comfortable with each other, the talk moved back in time, to their springtime interlude in Salzburg.

"I knew from the start that there was something wrong with your story, but everyone else seemed to believe it," he declared, slicing off a juicy bit of roast duckling and transferring it to Maria's plate.

"That's because I made a point of talking about my – ehrm – my so-called husband all the time. To Patrick and Clara, and to anyone else who would listen. I had to get out ahead of any questions about me and Lottie. But I could never bring myself to talk about him with you. I couldn't pretend to ever have loved him. Even if he _was_ perfect," she finished with a laugh. "The ideal husband in every respect, except for not existing."

"Keep eating, less talking," he admonished her, brandishing a forkful of potatoes under her nose.

For dessert, the waiter advised them, there was an apricot soufflé, "but I'm afraid it will take a quarter-hour to prepare."

"Excellent. We're in no hurry. I've got eight years of waiting ahead of me," and her Captain waved the mystified waiter off with a grin. When he suggested that they mark their long-awaited visit to the café with a dance, Maria followed him onto the dance floor, even as she felt her cheeks warm with the memory of their last dance, the one that had ended in his bed. And there was also the memory of his soft kiss on the terrace. But there was something about that remark – eight years of waiting? – that chafed at her. He had been joking: surely it would not take eight more years for her to know her own heart, not after the eight years that had passed since the Laendler.

When they moved smoothly across the dance floor, their bodies fit together so naturally, so easily, that it was hard to remember the miserable circumstances under which they had parted in June. He held her firmly around the waist in a manner that was, while still decent, definitely proprietary.

"Having fun?" he murmured.

"Mm. Of course."

"I only asked because judging by the pained expression on your face, you're worrying yourself silly over some wretched problem or another," he commented.

"It's just that – eight _years_. I can't stop thinking about how we lost all of that time."

"I don't see it that way. We wouldn't be who we are – you _certainly_ wouldn't be who you are – without all that happened. And we wouldn't have Lottie! The trick will be to make the most of the time we have left. You are still young enough that we can have more children if you like."

Maria felt hope burst open inside her, like a flower.

"Really? In case you'venlost count, that would be nine children. Nine children! You would do that for me?"

"I wouldn't be doing it just for you." His lips brushed her forehead. "I would like it very much, to give you a – hold on, Maria. I thought we weren't going to rush things."

"Of course not!" she said hastily. "We ought to go about things quite deliberately. Step by careful step."

"That doesn't sound like the Maria I know," he laughed, spinning her about just long enough to unsteady her before tucking her even more firmly against his body, until his warm breath in her ear sent a shiver down her spine.

"But I didn't mean to say that it would take another eight years, of course," she babbled.

"What about eight months?" he teased. "Eight weeks? Eight days?"

"Eight seconds," she said, eyeing the waiter crossing the room toward their table with a steaming dish.

"_What?" _

Although the music continued, he brought them to such an abrupt stop that Maria stumbled a step or two before regaining her balance.

"Eight seconds. That's how long we have to get back to the table before our soufflé collapses," she explained.

"Oh!" he said ruefully. "I was only hoping that you wanted to-" Maria couldn't help but laugh out loud at the disappointment on his face.

"Whatever am I going to do with you, Fraulein?"

His voice was threaded with amusement, but his blue eyes were dark with something so tempting and dangerous she couldn't bear it. All she could do was bury her head in his shoulder and half-hope he would not hear her muffled response.

"You know perfectly well that you can do whatever you want," she muttered.

The soufflé was delectable, pure ambrosia, yet Maria was unable to manage more than a few bites. For one thing, he had abandoned his chair and had seated himself next to her on the banquette instead, taking her unoccupied hand in his. She felt the soft stroke of his thumb on her wrist _everywhere. _ Looking around to be sure they were unobserved, he said in a low voice, "I meant what I said. I'll wait for you, but I'm also not above trying to change your mind. Because, to be perfectly honest, right now I want you so much I can hardly breathe."

"You do?" Maria shifted in her seat, curling her toes against a sudden wave – no, more like an _ache _– at the memory of their encounter. She reminded herself that he had treated her and Lottie badly, but his repeated and abject apologies had begun to take the sting out of months of remembered hurt.

"Of course I do! I've thought of little else since that night. How could you doubt it?"

"Because I - I thought that perhaps I had disappointed you."

"_Disappointed_ me? Nothing could be further from the truth, Maria!"

"I mean," she flustered, "You thought I was – ehrm – experienced, and when it turned out that I didn't know how to -"

"No, no," he insisted. "It was I who did everything wrong."

"Not _everything,_" she blushed.

"Is there something wrong with the soufflé?" the waiter had appeared out of nowhere.

"No. It was _perfect_," her Captain said hoarsely, not taking his eyes from her.

"But you haven't touched yours, sir," the waiter pointed out. "And you, Fraulein?"

"I loved it," Maria whispered, before she let herself get pulled deep into that blue gaze, until she might drown solely for the pleasure of letting him rescue her.

"Then it was worth waiting for after all," the waiter said smugly.

In that moment, Maria remembered that she was the brave one, the one who had crossed the Alps and made a new life for herself out of nothing. Who had kissed her way across Switzerland, searching for a happy ending she had no hope of. And she thought about how the best things – like being Lottie's mother – sometimes started in middle, and not at the very beginning.

"To hell with waiting," said Maria, throwing down her napkin, but her Captain was already on his feet.

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Georg awakened to the smack of raindrops on the windows and a thin gray morning light that barely penetrated the room. The gloomy weather was typical for autumn in Salzburg, but it hardly mattered because his heart was like a sun, love and passion without limit burning in his chest. He was back in his bed in the Hotel Bristol, and although the space next to him was vacant, he knew without any doubts that she was nearby, and that she would never run away from him again.

From the ensuite came a woman's cheery morning sounds – tooth-brushing, water running in the tub, a scrap of music in her sweet soprano: the Edelweiss song. In the end, Maria had been his Edelweiss, the enduring symbol of his homeland and of hope.

He rolled out of bed and rooted around in his luggage for a nightshirt, full of energy despite having slept very little, and that on top of the previous sleepless night. While he might not have slept very much, a great deal had been accomplished instead: "I love you" had gone from an unspoken and futile emotion to one easily and frequently expressed by both of them; and he had broken her of the habit of calling him 'Captain,' for good he hoped. Best of all, he had come to understand that Maria would always exhibit those two sides – the shy, girlish innocent and the bold vixen. Both were a permanent part of her, and he would have the privilege and task of caring for watching out for both of them, and for the rest of his life.

The thought of her mix of confidence and vulnerability made him ache for her until his whole body tightened at the memory. That was another thing: the way she had brought parts of him he had thought long dead, roaring back to life, until what had happened in Milan was a mere wisp of a memory. Did Maria appreciate it, the way she could undo him with a look, that her scent made him weak?

Georg abandoned his search for the nightshirt and returned to bed. He would give her five more minutes to herself, he decided, before interrupting her bath for something more worthwhile. Meanwhile, he ran over the plans for the day in his mind. The very first thing would be retrieving Lottie from Clara's care and breaking the momentous news to her. He moved his fingers against the coverlet, recalling the signs Maria had taught him somewhere in the middle of the night:

_I will be your Papa for always. _

Then the Mayor's office, for a quick wedding and to finalize Lottie's adoption. The afternoon would be for errands and shopping, starting with new wardrobes for Lottie and for Maria. If he never saw another polka-dot, he thought grimly, he wouldn't be sorry. While it wasn't a very festive way to celebrate their marriage, the errands were a necessity, for they would leave the next morning for six weeks' travel, first Switzerland to collect Gretl and Marta, then London to retrieve Louisa, Kurt and Brigitta, before taking the whole party on a week's voyage across the Atlantic to spend Christmas with Friedrich, Liesl, Tom and Mary Agathe. They'd be back in Salzburg in time for Maria to assume her teaching duties when Lottie started school.

On the other side of the bathroom door, with splashing water as a backdrop, Maria had shifted from Austrian folksongs to Broadway, singing with gusto:

_When you're awake, the things you think_

_Come from the dreams you dream_

_Thought has wings_

_And lots of things_

_Are seldom what they seem_

_Sometimes you think you've lived before_

_All that you live today_

_Things you do_

_Come back to you_

_As though they knew the way._

Surely it had been five minutes by now, Georg thought. He leapt from the bed and stalked across the room, knocking on the door.

"Maria? Are you coming out of there anytime soon or do I have to come in and get you?"

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO**

**THE END**

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**And that's a (long-delayed) wrap. I always like to leave my readers, if there are any of you left, with an enticing image. I don't own TSOM but writing about it still brings me great joy. **

**During my huge life transition, I've been pretty absent from the fandom, but I have been reading (although not reviewing) stories by a few of my favorite authors, and monitoring Proboards for spammers. **

**I do have another story knocking around in my head, although it may be a long time before I get it down on paper, and I'm having trouble deciding how – ehrm – mature to make it. I never know which style my readers prefer.**

**Anyway, sending love and best wishes for a happy 2020 out there to the fandom.**


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